


but baby you only need me-OW!

by unsettle



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Urban Fantasy, Friendship, M/M, Magic, Mild Sexual Content, Witches, catboys...., im gonna say it: yuta is the cat, may i say... its pretty cute, taeyong works at his mom's restaurant and yuta is the new hot employee, tw mentions of depression and crippling loneliness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-09
Updated: 2020-07-09
Packaged: 2021-03-04 22:29:00
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 23,013
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25163938
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unsettle/pseuds/unsettle
Summary: “Not the brightest around here, huh?” Yuta muttered, just loud enough for Taeyong to hear.Taeyong’s mouth fell open, but Johnny reacted before he could. He elbowed his friend and shot Taeyong with an apologetic smile, “Don’t mind him. He’s an asshole sometimes.”or, taeyong learns that he hardly knew anything about the world he lived in and the people he loved. enter some alienation, sexy curses and cats
Relationships: Kim Dongyoung | Doyoung/Suh Youngho | Johnny, Lee Taeyong/Nakamoto Yuta, kunten if you squint - Relationship
Comments: 15
Kudos: 71





	but baby you only need me-OW!

**Author's Note:**

> hey!!
> 
> this took a REALLY long time to write because i started it when my sem was still going on and then accidentally deleted it. as i was writing it (afresh), i realised about halfway through that yuta was too off, so i had to correct him. honestly idk how it all came through. i've never written something this long and i've never been into world building too much. my plots used to be quiet banal and ordinary. i think my strength is in writing relationships, of which there is a lot too!! but i wish i didnt write so much dialogue tho. i feel like im demeaning my audience.
> 
> any comments/criticism is most welcome!

Until last week, Lee Taeyong – former (disputed adjective) dancer, Neo Noodle employee and cat lover extraordinaire – was lying around and waiting the worst to come, until it did. 

Taeyong had only thought about half of what he had prattled before it slipped out and smashed open the Pandora’s Box. In his defence, if you have thought about something as many times as he has about it, it was bound to come out sooner or later, all it would take one was one too many rounds of cranberry vodkas on a tiring day. For Taeyong, it took that sliver of irritation that swallows you when you’re picking at dried scab on your elbow that you shouldn’t be picking in the first place and had made a miscalculation about how far it had healed.

He only vaguely remembered what Doyoung had said to provoke him – something about Taeyong still not having applied for a job at an elementary school to teach dance to third-graders. Then Taeyong promptly dug his own grave with a single sentence.

“Well, some of us aren’t all as excited to accept failure at the beginning of our careers, Doyoung. We can’t all be the entire world’s blue-eyed boy.”

“What does that mean?”

“Exactly what it sounds like,” Taeyong muttered, distracted. Then as an afterthought: “Okay, sorry. It’s nothing, forget it.”

He went back to soothing his stinging scab for what felt like a few moments before he registered the hollow silence in the room. When he glanced up, Doyoung had tears in his eyes, along with the look of pure, heart-shattering defeat, like someone had been pumping him with scorching hot steam until the lid finally hit the ceiling.

Taeyong’s tongue refused to move, and before he could manage to utter the first syllable of Doyoung’s name, he was cut off.

“No, shut up. Don’t,” Doyoung’s voice was heavy with restraint. “You know something, Taeyong? It is nothing, but not only is it nothing, it is but a vile, intrusive hallucination of yours that you decide to spend the better half of your time focusing on instead of anything constructive! It is so blatantly untrue that it’s jarring. Another one of your stupid, nonsensical insecurities that no one gives a shit about, because you simply _refuse_ to get your shit together!”

His voice got progressively louder and Taeyong heard himself swallow. 

“And you know what else? I can be the most willing man in the whole wide world if all it took was to put up with you. I would wait till the end of fucking time for you, Taeyong. I would wait till all the oceans dried up and all the birds died. But what I will not stand is you pretending as though I’m some God-sent Mr. Google who has sailed through life without having to worry about a single thing in life. I’m not really the one for self-pity, Taeyong, but don’t you dare let that delude you into thinking you can walk all over me and erase my struggle. 

“And I know, I know more than any damn bitch who ever lived that you are in pain, okay? And every day I wake up hating it as much as you do. But for one goddamn moment I want you to stop wallowing and look around you and realise what people in your life are willing to do for you instead of acting like the universe is plotting against you. Especially when you don’t know the first thing about their pain.”

The last sentence only sunk in later, by which time Doyoung was long gone and the sound of the door nagging shut had been permanently looped in Taeyong’s head.

-

When Lee Taeyong was born, the world stopped to stare for one staggering moment, and then as though nothing had happened, it moved on. One day, his mother thought to herself that her son would live to become a leader among men, a flower amidst a desert, or something of the sort, but time extinguished her fantasy, like she was swallowing a laxative. 

At least that’s how he imagined it, but as you can see his proclivity to downplay himself was allegedly not widely appreciated, so he would try and put an end to it, Taeyong supposed. 

As a child he was quiet and shy, and his mind equally restless and distracted. At elementary school, the time he didn’t spend doodling – expertly unobtrusive – he spent looking across the room, out of the window (his home room teacher sure to put him as far away from the windows as possible), lost in feckless daydreams of candy canes and flying cars.

Alas, although now he thought it was ridiculous to compare life to race, he had to admit it was treated like one – all it took was the people with the reigns to think of it that way – and soon every individual is broken in like a horse, hoofs split and eyes plastered with blinders. Taeyong insisted that the tunnel vision helped nobody, and in fact it brought him to a point in life where he was counting the thing that mattered to him on his fingers.

But the few things that mattered to him were to him the very air he breathed, and the abeyance of any of them left him helpless and shattered. The first of them was losing his grandmother when he was nineteen, and no one had told him that whether it was old age or a deadly, grotesque disease, the pain did not necessarily have to be different. It just depended on the person you were, and Taeyong happened to be the kind who dealt with in it the worst way possible. 

It should’ve been a moment of enlightenment, and realisation of the brevity of life but young Taeyong was selfish and unable to think beyond how his recursive, bland life just _had_ to take away the things that made it worth living. In hindsight, he was probably being dramatic. Eventually he got over it – or rather he stopped being a prick and crying – when he realised how it deeply troubled his mother.

Taeyong always had taken – and still did – a foolishly long time to learn from his mistakes, which led him to the second one (now this is the revised edition, he had previously waitlisted several incidents for the second position for Worst Things to Ever Happen to Me but when this happened everything hitherto was rendered absolutely insignificant). In the last year of undergrad, he busted his knee, and consequently couldn’t dance – or do much else – for a semester and half. 

He hadn’t been dancing for long, but it very quickly became instrumental to his routine and happiness – incidentally, he was fucking great at it. He made fantastic friends, although as always, few but that’s because of his nature, through dance and although it wasn’t part of what he was studying (his father didn’t think it was fruitful enough), he acted like it was. In fact, he secretly was sure that it was what he wanted to do in life. 

The thing was, he didn’t have a lot of opportunities to push himself to the brink in the dance room, which he now thought for perhaps for the best, so instead he broke his leg trying to limbo while carrying jerry cans full of water, each weighing twenty kilograms, while piss-drunk. He couldn’t even remember the context, but perhaps that was for the best too.

So, now here he was, waiting tables at his mother’s tiny typical Korean restaurant, listlessly applying to jobs he's only slightly more excited about than the former. 

And maybe life wasn’t so bad at the restaurant either. He helped out in some way or the other every summer and on weekends – it was part of his household chores, almost.

The place was truly miniscule, with only four staff. His mother, who did almost all the cooking, Taeyong, who did all the serving and waiting, and Donghyuck, along with Yerim who both pretended to chop vegetables but traded any work in favour of chit chatting at every little opportunity, which was practically once in ten minutes. At least they washed the dishes (most of the time). 

There was an imperative need for more staff in the kitchen, but first his mother had to admit that the pair of devils do no work, which she will over her dead body. She adored them too much. 

Donghyuck was Taeyong’s cousin, and his mother co-owned the restaurant with her sister, and Yerim their neighbour. Yerim’s mother was a close childhood friend of his own mother, and they all thought the two of them could use something to keep them occupied, since all the foreign students that usually worked had gone home for summer. 

They hadn’t known each other for very long – Yerim was a year older than Hyuck – but they were thick as thieves in no time. When they met, Taeyong was sure a couple of stars were somewhere aligned.

Work was the last thing on Donghyuck and Yerim’s minds. They spent most of their time gossiping and conspiring in the kitchen, or trying to get Taeyong to buy them weed (“Oppa, all you have to do is tell us where to meet him. We won’t utter your name at all!” “Yerim, the sink is overflowing.”) only getting to tasks during rush hour – and once Taeyong’s mother had given them an earful. Sometimes they brought in the bunch of morons Donghyuck called friends and forgot about work all together. 

Taeyong loved them with every inch of his being, but that didn’t stop him from acknowledging their uselessness. Like now. He peeped in through the window briefly to spot them hunched over Yerim’s phone, engrossed in some period drama. 

“Taeyong!” someone whisper-yelled at him. It was his mother, leaning out of the window and staring at him, expectant. He stared back, clueless, until she rolled her eyes and gestured towards the door, where a fresh group of customers were walking in. 

Perhaps he was no better.

Taeyong scrambled for his notepad and pen, dropped it as he tried to pull it out from where it was tucked behind his ear, and grabbed a few menu cards to hand them out, but as he stumbled closer, he recognised the group (he wasn’t wearing his glasses, and he had forgotten to take out his contacts the previous night). 

“Hey, Taeyong!” Johnny Suh exclaimed, flashing him a million-dollar, Colgate smile. Johnny had just graduated alongside him, and used to host a late-night college radio with another student, which is most of what he knows about him. Along with the fact that he was basically the modern-day Prince Charming. 

“Hi,” Taeyong responded meekly. He didn’t do well in front of handsome, looming men with permanently flirtatious smiles, and the college football team was the best and worst of them. Taeyong realised he was in a lot of trouble once he realised most of them nice too. “Are you guys already ready to order?”

“Oh, yeah,” Johnny nodded. “We’ll just have a few drinks and snacks, actually.”

Taeyong nodded, writing down the small order quickly. Usually there were about fifty of them, and it took him a good ten minutes to write down everyone’s order. There were only about four of them today. The rest, again, had probably gone home. 

After they ordered, Taeyong sauntered back to his station and tried to surreptitiously ogle the men over his sketchbook, but kept meeting the eyes of one boy. Taeyong didn’t remember seeing him at the restaurant before. He would definitely remember if he had. 

He had a slight build, with sharp but narrow shoulders jutting out as he sat his arms folded on the table and head sunk between them. Next to Johnny, he looked small, but his face put everyone to shame. A compilation of all of Taeyong’s stolen glances indicated a slim face and razor-sharp nose rested between deep, piercing black eyes. He looked like thirteen-year-old, closeted Taeyong’s worst nightmare, and present Taeyong’s wildest dream.

Returning fully to his sketchbook again, he hoped the boy would return again so Taeyong could quietly stare at him. He was growing tired of seeing the same faces anyway. Johnny Suh was a darling, but there’s only much you can extract from the look-don’t-touch thing that Taeyong was going for. 

Johnny was probably taken anyway, and Taeyong had probably forgotten everything he knew about courtship about eleven months ago, when Sehun decided fucking him raw didn’t erase the fact that neither of them cared for the relationship anymore.

The pretty boy didn’t fail him. Two days later, he was back, but this time he was accompanied by Johnny, and walked right up to Taeyong, who was assiduously shredding a piece of newspaper into the tiniest bits possible at a table. 

It was an uneventful hour in the day, because most of their customers were office workers, who come in for breakfast and lunch, and students, who start arriving at nine. Taeyong’s mother was quite a whimsical business woman, who would’ve marched the restaurant into bankruptcy if not for Donghyuck’s mother, who kept her tethered. The two sisters were no longer dependent on the income from the restaurant, so if not for the fact that his mother was sort of a genius when it came to her job, they would’ve been put out a while ago.

After a decade or so of running it, she decided she could do away with a few in-between hours when they never got much business, but the inert afternoons remained, and on such an afternoon, a hesitant finger crept into Taeyong’s vision and tapped on the table top. 

He ripped the earphones from his ears and snatched all the bits of paper in a single frantic motion. When he snapped his head up, he had to keep himself from a spluttering.

“Hey, Taeyong,” Johnny greeted, warm as ever. “This is Yuta, he’s from our year, but he only did his last year here. He’s also a forward on the team, and the best.”

Taeyong shook the other man’s hand with a puzzled but polite smile.

“Hey,” he said, and smiled a truly, utterly blinding smile with a lot of teeth. “I saw the sign outside-“

He stated it like a self-evident fact.

“– I was hoping the position is still open.”

Taeyong blinked at Yuta, trying not to get distracted by the way his hair fell into his eyes, and fruitlessly trying to think of the best way to tell him that he hadn’t a single hint of what he was on about. 

Thankfully, a guardian who looked suspiciously like the spawn of the devil came to his rescue.

“Awesome!” Donghyuck exclaimed from the window. “No, we haven’t!”

To Taeyong he muttered, “Ah, hyung. Pay attention to your surroundings sometimes. Can’t believe I’m a part-timer and know more than you.”

And then, turning back to Yuta and Johnny, “I’ll just get Mrs. Lee. Please wait here.” Bounding off, he stuck his head out the back door, and let out an inhumanely and very unnecessarily loud, “Auntie!”

Oh. So apparently they were hiring more help. Taeyong pulled in his lips and tried to suppress the embarrassment. It was no secret that Donghyuck was a lot more involved and adept with affairs of running the restaurant (again, despite not doing any work). His mother never bothered Taeyong with them as he was too hopelessly absent-minded.

“Not the brightest around here, huh?” Yuta muttered, just loud enough for Taeyong to hear.

Taeyong’s mouth fell open, but Johnny reacted before he could. He elbowed his friend and shot Taeyong with an apologetic smile, “Don’t mind him. He’s an asshole sometimes.”

Taeyong closed his mouth, confused as to what he had done to this guy for him to be an asshole to Taeyong, a literal _stranger_ , but he let it pass. Mostly because he didn’t know how to retaliate. 

A moment later, his mother entered the front, “Well, hello! Johnny, what a surprise!”

Johnny was his mother’s darling boy. She called him an ideal son-in-law at least thrice a day, not in implication that Taeyong should woo him, but that because if she called him an ideal son it would kind of be a direct jab at Taeyong. 

“Hi, Auntie,” Johnny said abashedly. “This is Yuta, he’s my friend.”

“Oh! Japanese?”

Yuta nodded, all polite and proper, and held out a hand.

“Well, konichiwa!” she exclaimed, making Taeyong put his head in his hands in embarrassment. “Do you have a minute, Yuta-ssi? We can do your interview now, if you’d like.”

“Uh, yeah,” he replied. “That would be great.”

“Come, let’s sit outside,” his mother said, leading Yuta away from Taeyong until he’s left alone with Johnny Suh and Donghyuck, who muttered a faint ‘I like him’, and Taeyong prayed to every single deity there ever existed that his mother reject Yuta, regardless of his divinely sculpted face. He _cannot_ handle another bully in his workplace.

“Hyung,” Donghyuck said to Johnny in a hushed tone. The other man leaned in, amused. “Do you, you know.”

He looked sideways, and Taeyong had a terrible hunch about what he was going to say.

“Do you smoke grass?”

Johnny quirked an eyebrow, a confused smile playing on his face, and Taeyong groaned. 

“That’s enough. Leave.”

Johnny let out deep, rich laughter that sounded like it emerged from the hollows of his stomach.. Donghyuck scowled at Taeyong but complied.

“Hey, sorry about that earlier,” Johnny said. “He gets sarcastic when he’s nervous. He never means it. Well, almost.”

Taeyong nodded, although still unconvinced, "It's okay." 

However, there was some truth to what Johnny said. When the two left, Yuta sent a smirk Taeyong's way and a cockily mouthed 'sorry'. 

Taeyong tried his best to hide the heat scurrying to his face. 

+

Taeyong’s mother chirped excitedly about Yuta as they were closing up, and Taeyong scrubbed at a particularly stubborn stain on the saucepan and hummed with veiled interest. Spoiler alert: she hired him – full-time, on all days except Saturday. 

Nakamoto Yuta was a fresh graduate, with a degree in Psychology. He did his last semester in Korea on an exchange program, which explained why Taeyong never saw him around before. His parents were both dentists and he had an older sister, married fresh out of college. He had a fair share of experience in the kitchen, having worked at a ramen joint for several years. 

Taeyong considered telling her that Yuta was a pig to him in the first five seconds of meeting him, but because of reasons rather personal and unrelated to Yuta's lovely eyes, he held his tongue.

“Are you sure he’s not like, an axe murderer or something?”

His mother threw him an unimpressed look, “You kids nowadays watch too much “Home of Thrones” and whatever nonsense. He's a foreign student who couldn't order food till three months ago, Yong. ”

He chuckled, not bothering to correct her on the botched reference, and carefully put away all the clean dishes. “Well, I’m glad you have more help in here, now.”

Taeyong always felt a bit guilty about not being the one in the kitchen himself. He used to be for a summer and wasn’t bad in the kitchen at all, but his mother thought that he wasn’t cut out for it, and he too simply didn’t like it, so she started to make him wait tables instead. He enjoyed cooking – just not every day.

She hummed, “Yes, very much.”

A pause.

“Darling.”

“Hm?”

“Did you have a disagreement with Doyoung?”

Taeyong stared at his mother with his mouth ajar. He hadn’t told her a thing. “It’s,” he blurted, “it’s nothing to worry about. We’ll resolve it.”

There was no way to lie to such a woman. Goddammit. 

“Okay,” she nodded. “I trust you.”

Taeyong muttered an inaudible ‘yeah’.

“How are the job applications coming along?”

Wow, no one told him today was the day of talking about difficult topics. 

“Uh, yeah, I applied for the instructor position at the school and at two studios, too.”

Taeyong had been sitting on his job applications since what seemed like the beginning of time, but after the episode two days ago, he decided he’d better up his game. If not for his own sake, then for the sake of the sanity of people around him.

“Hey, ma,” he added, slowly. “I’m not sure about any of these, okay? I’m still thinking about if I really wanna teach dance, or even do dance. And it’s not my insecurity speaking, I promise.”

His mother looked at him appraisingly, but nodded. Walking across the room, she tiptoed and pressed a kiss to his cheek. “Anything, baby. You’ll figure it out.”

He smiled at her, feigning reassurance. To avoid any furthering of the conversation, he grabbed the garbage bags and went to dispose of them. 

So now, to the elephant in the room. 

Kim Doyoung was to Taeyong more than a best friend. He was more than any word Taeyong could conjure up, but that probably had to do with the fact that his vocabulary has stayed the same since high school, in stark contrast to Doyoung, who talked like he ate academic essays for breakfast. 

Anyway, they met as children, Doyoung as grumpy and up-tight as Taeyong was lost and ditzy. From the beginning, he meticulously practiced hard love, assaulting Taeyong with insults and scorn at every opportunity, but making it up with an overload of protectiveness every time. He seemed to have been under the impression that his mother didn’t do enough of that, which wasn’t untrue.

Taeyong was by nature somewhat demure, whereas Doyoung was a mountain. Whatever Taeyong was, he was more. Admirable grades, internships lined up every summer, healthy coping mechanisms, amazing cooking skills. Oh, forget Johnny, he was first on his mother’s list of Ideal Sons-in-Law.

Through the years, he had been Taeyong’s primary source of strength, and whatever envy Taeyong occasionally felt evaporated when faced with his love and appreciation for Doyoung – except when he was in a bad place, which was where the problem began. 

Taeyong was aware that he had been throwing snide, conceited remarks at him for months - since the injury, more specifically. In a twisted way, he seemed like he wanted to see Doyoung break and lose his patience, and he had been _so_ patient with Taeyong, at some level he felt completely undeserving. It was simply an insidious projection of his worst insecurities. 

Naturally, he quickly suppressed the thought. After the fight, he spent a good hour staring at his ceiling and processing everything. Doyoung was right, as he always was. Taeyong merely had to will himself out of his dip, or go to therapy. Something. 

However, he knew Doyoung needed a few days to simmer down, so he had been staying low since. He found it unsettling that Doyoung hadn’t reached out yet, but perhaps he just had other things on his mind and needed more time. 

Just as he placed the garbage bags in the bin, a soft meow caught his attention. A few feet from him, a shadow moved and an instant later, a singly black cat stepped into the light.

“Hey,” Taeyong called softly. “There you are.”

He glanced around for the can of tuna he had set out earlier, finding it untouched yet again. He sighed. Maybe it just sourced its food from elsewhere, so he could quit his attempts to feed it. Squatting down, he held out an open hand, and the creature walked into it, gently nuzzling into his palm. 

Taeyong always wanted a cat, but his father was severely allergic to most animals, so instead he resorted to half-adopting all the street cats he came across and then violently scrubbing his hands when he got home. 

This particular cat was the newest addition. He was still feeding a few cats in the back alley of the bistro, but this one stood out. For one, it had the richest black fur Taeyong had even seen on a street cat. Its behaviour was a somewhat aloof, even more so than other cats, and Taeyong almost found it regal, yet it welcomed affection. 

Incidentally, it never touched a single piece of food Taeyong set out for it. Apparently it only came to him just for a few rubs and cooing, which he took immense pride in.

“Not hungry?” he asked, scratching under its chin. 

The cat arched out its back, then arched the other way and purred softly, prompting some revolting baby talk from him. He watched it for a few minutes as it nuzzled into his touches, never too desperate, but clearly enjoying it. Then, exhaling, he pulled out his phone from his back pocket and typed out a text.

**From: You  
To: Doyoungiee  
**

_hey_

-

Mornings were always fun because they had to prepare for the day, and even if it meant carrying cartons of eggs to the kitchen from the food truck or dusting the dining area, yet it was never too much work. Taeyong enjoyed it. Meal times he enjoyed as well – after so many years of growing up with the restaurant, he was used to the rush. 

It was waiting that he sometimes despised. Some days his mind ran wild, but there were also days when it had nothing to offer, and boredom drove him up the wall. This was even worse, when he could think of nothing but hearing a single notification buzz from a certain someone. 

For a few hours he tried to work on a sketch and read a book. At about 4 p.m. Donghyuck’s troop barged in noisily. Taeyong startled at the sudden cacophony. Once they finished settling down around a table clearly too small for the seven of them, he was impressed that they hadn’t punched a hole in his eardrum. 

Turning his head away, he went back to focusing on the novel. Truth be told, Taeyong was having trouble keeping up with the archaic, convoluted writing, and the constant whispering from the next table didn’t help. On top of that the protagonist was a sorry, self-pitying loser and extremely unlikable. 

The author was probably consciously doing it, but Taeyong was now positively irritated that his eavesdropping was unsuccessful and he really wanted to know what they were talking about.

Snapping his book shut, he stood up from his station and awkwardly walked around, trying to find a lee way to butt in. They had been nodding with deadly earnest for the past ten minutes, all of them dead earnest, and didn’t look up even after the third time Taeyong violently cleared his – very healthy and dry – throat.

He was about to start humming embarrassingly when one large, round head shot up and then he found himself staring awkwardly at an unmoving Jisung – a quiet, mouse-like, boy who, rather than tall, was absurdly long – for five lengthy seconds, until Donghyuck noticed the disruption and turned around himself.

“Can we help you?” he asked insolently, eyebrows raised and tone firm, although impatient. Taeyong realised if he displayed any sign of weakness now, he would surely be shooed away. 

Donghyuck, because he’s a prick like that, makes sure his friends don’t share gossip with him although Mark or Jeno slip it in when he’s not looking. 

“What’s the little secret meeting for?”

Donghyuck was clearly about to ignore Taeyong’s existence and go back to his discussion, but Mark threw his hands in the air exasperatedly.

“No, hyung, stay,” he said, and turning to his friends with pursed lips, continued. “I think we can use an adult opinion on this.”

“Taeyong-hyung as much an adult as Chenle is, we don’t need his opinion,” Donghyuck remarked.

“Hey!” Taeyong protested, ignoring Chenle’s satisfied smile.

“No, I agree,” said a low, calm voice. Jeno looked nervous and unsure, and now Taeyong was now wondering what the fuck was going on (oh God, did they finally find a campus dealer?).

Donghyuck sighed dramatically. “Whatever, fine. Jisung, tell him.”

Jisung sat there, still as a desk, and after a moment, pointed to himself and asked in a squeak, “Me?”

Heaving another theatrical sigh, Donghyuck cocked an eyebrow, “do you see another Jisung here?’

“Oh, okay,” the younger boy replied. He was truly a walking anomaly, with a deep voice and large hands but the shiest personality. “I, erm, from the beginning?”

“Obviously!”

“Okay. I’ve been getting weird phone-calls.”

Taeyong blinked at him. “Okay, go on.”

“Um,” he stuttered. “I get a call, and when I, like pick up, it’s like. Super weird. It’s –“

Renjun – a small, intense boy – makes a frustrated noise, “Can you stop talking like you’re being interrogated by the fucking cops? Taeyong-hyung isn’t going to eat you! Ugh. Whatever, I’ll tell him.”

He clears his throat and looks at Taeyong with a weighted expression, “For two weeks now, Jisung here has been really strange phone calls, I guess that much he’s made clear, "- he throws Jisung a lethal glare, - "At first, there was no answer, and also it’s a private number. He tried calling back, but they never picked up. He thought it was some sales agent with bad reception so he just ignored it until one day, they called again and when they said hello,”

He glanced around nervously, “It was his own voice.”

A pause, and then he continued.

“We think it _is_ him, he’s been hijacked by an alien.”

“Like,” Taeyong bit his tongue and said with some restraint. “A possession.’

Five eager heads nodded vigorously, Mark shook his head in disbelief and Jeno smiled at Taeyong apologetically. 

“And his number is also private.”

“Why on earth is his number private?”

Jisung looked at Taeyong imploringly, “So many reasons, Taeyong-hyung. Aliens, government surveillance, corporations. We have to practice absolute secrecy in a world like this.”

Renjun rolled his eyes, “His dad is a CEO, he makes him do it. But anyway, coming back, I think he should be exorcised. ”

For about a minute, Taeyong wondered if he really looked like that much of a buffoon to them. He knew he could be gullible, which Donghyuck regularly took advantage of. His pranks ranged from telling him that Mark and Yerim were together (which he believed for months) to almost convincing him that he needed to do recreational weed because he had a mild anxiety disorder (why does it _always_ revert back to the drugs?). 

These kids may seem like a harmless bunch but Taeyong had heard the countless stories of their moronic shenanigans in excruciating detail from his mother (let’s just say she had to pick up Donghyuck and Jaemin from the police station last fall.)

But he waited, and waited, and not a single boy broke the act. He was so preoccupied, he realised belatedly that Yuta had returned from the delivery he wasn’t meant to go on. From the window, he watched the man remove his helmet, his hair sweating at the ends, and climb off his scooter.

When he entered through the front, all the eight pairs of eyes turned to fixate on him, but he walked past without so much as looking at them even once. He was a soccer player, you see. He’s not _ordinary_. Ugh. Taeyong wanted to spit in his lunch. 

“Taeyong-hyung,” Renjun called, getting back his attention. His worried expression hadn’t mitigated one bit. “I know what you’re thinking. This isn’t some prank. If it is we can beat up Hyuck together.”

“Why me!”

Renjun shrugged. “Seems appropriate.”

As they dissolved into a fit of bickering, Taeyong took his cue to leave and tiptoed into the kitchen. Yuta heard him. (He seemed to have the hearing sense of an animal, really.) He was restocking the fridge with beer, and when he saw Taeyong, he simply raised an eyebrow at him and went back to his task. 

Taeyong racked his mind for a question. He was in equal part awkward with Yuta and frightened of when he would make a jab at him, but for the sake of the summer, for the sake of not letting go of such a beautiful specimen, he was willing to try.

“Have you seen my mother?’ he asked, to which Yuta simply shook his head without even looking up, a faint frown lacing his expression. He knew where his mom was anyway. She was taking a smoke break, except she didn’t smoke, so she was just hanging out outside.

“How was your delivery?”

Yuta shrugged. “It was a delivery.”

“Oh. Um, you sleep well?”

“Like a fucking baby.” 

“Oh. That’s nice.”

Taeyong stood in the doorway, not knowing what to do. Guess Yuta was in fact just a sleazebag who was nice as long as he wanted something. Taeyong just had to resolve himself to an awful summer, wedged in between a band of babbling lunatics and a too-cool-for-school forward who looked like a runway model. Great.

He sighed privately. 

“I’ll be out in the front, if you need me, I guess,” he said softly and slowly began trudging back.

“What were you guys talking about?” came Yuta’s voice, and Taeyong nearly slipped as he turned on his heel.

“Sorry?” he asked, despite having heard the question.

“The freaks. What were they talking about?” Yuta repeated, glancing up at Taeyong, with a softened expression. He’s seemingly finished restocking the fridge, so he began putting away the cartoon.

“Oh,” Taeyong laughed nervously. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

“Yeah?” Yuta smirked at him. His earring – a dangly, emerald stone – jiggled as he turned to look at Taeyong, instantly making him uneasy. “Try me.”

Taeyong let out more nervous laughter. “Do you need help with that?”

He pointed at the fresh batch of carrots Yuta had produced from the pantry. Taeyong grabbed two washed knives and handed on to the other man, who smiled at him. 

“Thanks.”

“This is Donghyuck’s task.”

“Exactly why I’m here, right?” Yuta muttered, a teasing smile playing on his lips.

Taeyong barked out a huff, then cleared his throat sombrely. “Yeah.”

“What was it, then?”

“Oh,” Taeyong waved his hand in the air. “Some nonsense, they think Jisung – the tall kid – is possessed. It’s definitely just another prank. Donghyuck once told them my IQ was 60, so they all think I’m really dumb.”

“Interesting. Is it?”

“No, obviously not,” Taeyong frowned, defensive (he didn’t know what you thought, but having such a rumour spread about you is really _not_ nice), but Yuta was just playing him again, grinning from ear to ear. Taeyong nudges him with his elbow.

“Someone’s getting defensive. Guess we’ll just have to wait and see.”

“What? No way. I –“

“Taeyong-hyung!” Donghyuck yelled blaringly. 

Taeyong gave Yuta a tight smile, and marched to the window, “what?”

“Could we have a free plate of fried dumplings?” Donghyuck was rocking back his chair, looking at Taeyong with his head upside down, as the others tried to look uninvolved.

“Absolutely not,” Taeyong snapped. His mother would have said yes, and so would he normally, but he was irritated that Donghyuck interrupted his banter with Yuta, which was embarrassing to admit.

Donghyuck looked smugly at Jisung and said, deliberately loud enough, “Told you. He’s not that much of a pushover.”

“Hey, I heard that!”

“Good, it was intended.”

“You know, you don’t have to be so mean to me.” 

It really wasn’t like Taeyong to take Donghyuck’s snide remarks seriously. He knew it was tantamount to throwing a full bottle of whiskey into a bonfire. Maybe it was because Yuta was new, and now he really didn’t want another person joining in on the daily ragging, which was the epitomic candidate for. 

His mother had already been on it for the last twenty odd years. He was fully aware that he was an easy target, but he would like the polite bickering to last a little longer, even if they were dripping with awkwardness on Taeyong’s part.

“It’s called negative reinforcement. I’m helping you,” Donghyuck shot back easily.

“What a devil,” Yuta grumbled.

“Taeyong-hyung,” Chenle abruptly interrupted, a troubled frown dancing on his child-like face. 

He walked up to the window and continued, his tone important and earnest. “You’re skinny, you’re sexy, you can cook. You don’t have to care about what Donghyuck says. He’s not even half the man that you are.”

Taeyong was momentarily transfixed by the sheer sincerity in the boy’s voice, and then the table erupted into a mess of Donghyuck chastising him for not referring to him as hyung and the others generally telling him to quit saying rubbish, resulting in Taeyong becoming even more confused. But when Chenle broke into tiny, sweet giggles, Taeyong joined the giggling himself. 

if When he looked sideways, Yuta was unsuccessfully attempting to hold back laughter.

-

Taeyong jumped a foot in the air when he saw Yuta’s head through the window. He ripped his earphones out, and demanded:

“Why are you still here here? I thought you left like an hour ago.”

Yuta shrugged. “I noticed you were closing up alone. And no, I’ve been here the entire time, airhead.”

Oh come on, there was no way Taeyong was that much of an goldfish, but he couldn’t tell if he remembered anything before he was playing with (and talking to) the Bombay cat outside about half an hour ago. He probably was hallucinating Yuta’s departure. Ugh. At this rate his mother is going to give all his inheritance to Donghyuck.

“Need some help?”

Taeyong looked at the sea of dishes he had begun to wash only ten minutes ago. Obviously, he had done this several times. Sometimes his mother had other things to tend to. Sometimes she was just too tired, and there would be no one else left to close up. 

But Christ, could he use some help. Just today, washing half a day’s worth of dishes seemed back-breakingly laborious.

“Yeah, I would like that,” Taeyong muttered under his breath, and quietly plugged his earphones in as Yuta joined him.

He didn’t try to make conversation with Taeyong. Having earphones plugged in was a powerful statement, after all, and Taeyong could really use some time to himself to think. Once they finish laying out the dishes, Taeyong switches off the music.

“I just don’t understand why she can’t just buy an industrial dishwasher, you know?” he complained.

Yuta huffed, “Someone would lose the income they make by washing dishes, then.”

“Goddammit. Okay, young Karl.”

The other grinned as he pushed his damp bangs from his face and began cleaning the stove. Taeyong ignored the beads of sweat dripping from his Adam’s apple.

“What do you want to do, now?”

Yuta blinked up at him, “Hire a few girls and party all night in Itaewon, of course.”

“Not now!” Taeyong blushed. “Like, in life.”

The other smirked up at him, but decided to humour him, “I don’t know. There’s not much you can do with a B.A. in psychology. So yeah, I’ll have to study further. What about you?”

“I don’t know,” Taeyong slid down the pantry door and sat on the floor. 

Yuta eyed him pointedly, “Nothing?”

“I’ve applied to a few teaching jobs. Dance. But I don’t know anymore. I wonder if I’ve ever wanted to dance for a living.”

“You broke your leg, right?”

“Yeah. How did you know?”

“Your mom told me.”

He groaned. “Of course she did.”

Parents didn’t have the most nuanced understanding of privacy. 

“You’re educated in two other things. Consider yourself lucky. Me? Those B.Sc psych fellows are probably laughing at us B.A guys right this second. Fucking smug bastards. ”

Taeyong laughed, “I feel like you’re fluent in Korean just so you can curse well.”

Getting off the floor, he pulled out the garbage bags and tied them. They didn’t speak much again, probably just wanting to go to bed as quickly as time allowed them. 

At least Taeyong did. He’d had an exhausting day. He really admired his cousin sometimes, who was blissfully preoccupied with something or the other in his own life. Whether it was another crush, or Jisung ghosting him, he kept his mind on small things, and he never tired.

When they parted, Yuta didn’t say goodnight back. He just gave him a nod and walked away, hands stuffed in pockets and tongue poking through the inside of his right cheek, like an anime antagonist. Too cool, Taeyong guessed, and smiled to himself as he turned towards his own house.

-

“This is blackmail,” Taeyong proclaimed, knowing very well that he would lose this argument, in some capacity. 

Despite all of Taeyong’s best efforts (which really weren’t all that vigorous) and against all odds, Donghyuck and Yerim had found out that Taeyong had (accidentally) thrown away all the receipts from last week in the trash. In his defence, he a) didn’t know the bunch contained receipts of the restaurant’s orders from wholesalers, and b) didn’t think they were all that important.

Besides, he didn’t know his mom would go off and tell _them_ to sort out finances (and as an ‘exercise’! What the fuck?) Now, they were threatening to tell her unless he gives them five bottles of rum – unopened, they specified – at Taeyong’s mother’s birthday party tonight. 

Taeyong really wanted to ask why they thought they needed so much alcohol, but it was obvious they didn’t actually know how much five bottles of rum was. 

“No shit, Sherlock,” Donghyuck deadpanned, staring at him intensely with Yerim right beside him. “Is that a deal?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. That’s a lot of rum, by the way.”

“Take it out from our paychecks.”

“Forget it, Hyuck.”

“Okay, three bottles.”

“I can’t give you booze right under your mom’s nose.”

“Point,” he remarked, and the two regrouped, whispering amongst themselves, and when they turned back they immediately straightened their expressions. 

“Okay, we’ve reconsidered,” he declared.

“You buy us lottery tickets.” Yerim added.

Taeyong frowned. That’s all? “Okay.”

“For a month.”

He sighed and threw the kitchen cloth he was holding aside. He didn’t need to be scared of his mother. The most he would get is a slap on the wrist and a lecture about being an oblivious buffoon at twenty-two. 

“Either both of you get back to work or I’m gonna take away your phones during working hours. I’m taking a break.”

The two erupted into empty threats and whining as Taeyong fished for his cigarettes in his apron pocket and slipped out through the back door. Maybe sometimes, if he didn’t care so much, Donghyuck wouldn’t be able to manipulate him like that.

Leaning on the mouldy wall was Yuta, scrolling through his phone – held unhealthily close to his face – and dusting a cigarette at half an arm’s reach. It was a strangely warm sight. His lips were puckered and his face twisted, as though he was deep in thought.

“Hey,” Taeyong called softly. 

Yuta looked up, still dazed for a few moments but when he registered Taeyong’s presence he quickly put the cigarette out before he could tell him it was okay. 

“Hey,” he mimicked. 

They were still unfamiliar with each other. After all it hadn’t been very long since Yuta joined them, only three weeks, but Taeyong had begun to enjoy his company.

Initially, Yuta struck him as cocky – which he was – but it soon became obvious that he was also socially inept, not unlike Taeyong himself, except he had the power of humour on his side, whereas Taeyong was utterly inept in every way. He only had his politeness in cases of extreme damage control.

Two introverts usually don’t make a good recipe, but it seemed as though Yuta took one for the team and acted as the extrovert in the situation.

Their conversations sailed smoothly for the most part. Yuta continued to be two-faced with his mother and Taeyong, but he didn’t really mind. His teasing somehow felt different from Donghyuck’s – somewhat like how Ten talked to Kun in the beginning, because he had decided that getting on the man’s nerves was the most effective way to get his attention.

Taeyong really couldn’t tell Yuta’s tone, actually. All he knew was that it grew on him rather quickly.

“You could’ve continued smoking,” Taeyong mumbled. 

“Huh?”

“Nothing,” he waved his hand dismissively. “It’s Mom’s birthday today, she’s throwing a party. Well, if you can call it that. It’s just gonna be family, two friends and Donghyuck’s and Yerim’s suicide squad. Not even family, my dad's not here. ”

Yuta laughed at that, “Yeah, she told me. What would his friends do there, though? There’s gonna be alcohol.”

Taeyong’s mother was… eccentric, at times. Not enough to cause them any worry, but she had her moments, so if she decided she wanted to throw the biggest party of her life for some made up occasion, she would. And if she decided she wanted to engage with “today’s youth” (by playing mafia with them), she would very well do that as well.

Taeyong sighed, “There will. And _I_ will have to keep an eye on it so it doesn’t disappear into the wrong hands. But yeah, I don’t know what she wants. Donghyuck was telling her some class drama the other day and she became very interested – told me all the details multiple times – and now she wants to hear more.”

Yuta scoffed, “She sure is psycho.”

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

“Oh, I would.”

Taeyong frowned at that. Yuta said that a lot, but then he decided he was here for a cause.

“So?”

“Hm?”

“Are you free tonight?”

Now as he had previously mentioned, Taeyong had been out of the dating business for long enough to have forgotten how to do this, but he had one trick up his sleeve. 

It turned out to be easier than he had anticipated to convince Yuta – by which he meant there was no need for convincing at all.

“I’ll think about it. Will there be any strippers?”

Taeyong gave him a shove.

“Okay, okay, kidding. I’ll be there.”

Taeyong broke into a smile and shuffled around his apron pocket, “That’s great. Cigarette?”

Yuta stole a glance at the beautiful, half-finished cigarette he had crushed a minute ago for no good reason, probably wanting to kick himself, but accepted a fresh once from the pack Taeyong held out. 

Taeyong stuck his hand inside his pocket again, frowning when he found no lighter, but Yuta pulled out a lighter and leaned in, cigarette held gently between his lips. Taeyong’s heart skipped a beat, and he came dangerously close to spluttering (again), but he decidedly pulled his stomach in to kill the stupid butterflies, and leaned in with his own cigarette. 

The moment felt like a minute as Taeyong trained his eyes on Yuta’s smooth, delicate hands, the lighter poised expertly between them, and then it was over.

Yuta seemed to be mindless of personal space in the weirdest of times, much to Taeyong’s despair. Whether it was reaching across for something in a he was nearly pressed against his torso, or leaning too close if he failed to hear him right. 

In Yuta’s defence, it truly seemed as though he was oblivious (although a moronic part of Taeyong wished it was in flirtation). It baffled Taeyong to no extent, because at times he seemed careful – like when he was cooking – and sometimes he was boyish and clumsy. 

“Thanks,” he managed to mutter before taking a drag.

“Should I wear something nice?”

Taeyong scoffed, “If you want to, but I’m gonna wear what I currently am. Unless she forces me to put on something else. At most I’ll wear a shirt.”

“Okay, then,” Yuta nodded. “Oh, the tuna can is empty, by the way, you should replace it.”

Taeyong glanced in the direction of the foot of the doorway, and true to Yuta’s word, the can of tuna that he had set out last night was licked clean. 

“You knew it was me?”

Unless his eyes were playing a trick on him, Taeyong saw a flicker of surprise in Yuta’s expression, but he just shrugged, “I just assumed. You peg me as that kinda nerd.”

“I’m gonna take that as a compliment.”

“Sure, buddy. Also I saw you petting one a few days ago.”

He had? Taeyong thought it had been a long time since he caught a cat, and he had it only when they were closing up. Hmm. Maybe he had just forgotten.

To Yuta, he said, “Okay. Thanks, I’ll replace it.”

The two returned to smoking in silence, and Yuta to surfing through Instagram. Taeyong glanced at his own phone. There was a text from Seulgi with a picture of some bread she had baked, and another from Ten, dutifully informing him that his boyfriend ‘went too hard’ the previous night and he is now unable to sit down.

Taeyong sighed, sending Seulgi some exclamations and hearts, and sending Ten a “do you have to do this every single time?” His friend seemed to think he was doing everyone a favour by sharing the details of his fairly excessive sexual endeavours.

But after that, he didn’t really feel like entering the void of scrolling through various apps. Instead he leaned back against the wall, and watched the smoke leave his mouth with every exhale.

In times like this, he tried not to let his mind drift. Summer was a bad time to fight with anyone, because there was endless time to ponder, and too much thinking never did anyone any good. 

And all it took was a week before all his dreams started to make sense and there was nothing left in his subconscious anymore, because he had started to think about everything under the sun.

“Can I ask you something?” Yuta suddenly inquired.

Taeyong blew out the smoke quickly, “Yeah.”

“You can tell me if it’s too personal,” he added. Taeyong nodded. “You always have an eye on your phone, and it’s almost a constant thing.”

Taeyong stared at him. What the fuck.

Yuta continued, avoiding his eyes, “Are you waiting for something? Because it’s been weeks, man.”

He barked out an awkward laugh, followed by Taeyong’s own. He considered playing it off, but it only occurred to him that he wasn’t being as subtle as he thought he was. Of course, he was waiting for something, and it made him sick to the bones every time he opened his phone and was still without it.

Yuta had done some deadly psychoanalysis.

So, despite himself, he said, “I didn’t know it was that obvious, ha-ha –“ he cleared his throat, “- It’s nothing really. A friend of mine and I had a small tiff, and he hasn’t texted back.”

Yuta nodded solemnly. His eyes – long lashes caressing his cheeks every time he blinked – gazing at Taeyong, simultaneously intense and easy. 

“You’re gonna be okay?”

The thing was: Taeyong no longer knew, and he was growing more and more terrified what his mind would reveal if he allowed himself to be honest. But he nodded anyway, murmuring, “I think so.”

“Are they close to you?”

Was Doyoung ‘close’? He wanted to laugh. “Yeah, pretty close.”

“It’ll be okay, just don’t keep waiting on them,” Yuta said. “Maybe they’re waiting on you.”

He smiled softly at Yuta, “Thanks.”

Their eyes locked briefly, and Taeyong refused to look away for a perilous second, but then Donghyuck’s voice came booming from the kitchen, telling them to get their asses back to the front, and they rushed back, frantically putting out their cigarettes.

When Taeyong accidentally caught Yuta’s eye through the window later, the other man sent him a faint, knowing smile and Taeyong’s insides twisted into themselves. 

For a while, the weight in his back pocket lightened.

-

Taeyong had lied. His mother never once forced him to dress well – he loved clothes, and if he dressed well it was his own effort. 

At six, he closed shop, bidding Yuta and Donghyuck (Yeri had been taking working less and less lately, because she had to prepare for college entrances, leaving her beloved accomplice partner-less) a temporary goodbye, and then he walked his swiftly home, which was practically behind the restaurant, to pick out his clothes for the evening.

However, Yuta turned up very, very late. Almost as Taeyong had given up, having checked his texts incessantly and contemplated giving him a call multiple, then eventually always deciding against it. 

He also felt guilty that he was spending his mother’s birthday party thinking about a boy, so he tried putting his mind off of it, but after the first hour of the party, Taeyong promptly retired to the kitchen to play guardian of the alcohol. 

It sounded ridiculous, but his mother knew parties exhausted Taeyong to no extent. He suspected it was just a cover up that, and then wondered what he would do without her in life.

She along with Donghyuck and Yerim’s mothers as expected went crazy with the alcohol, engrossed in a detailed story of some ghost in their kids’ school. Heaven only knew what made a fifty-two year old woman throw a birthday party for herself with high school children.

Taeyong tread back to the kitchen, drifting. It was only when he turned and propped an arm on the counter that he spotted Jisung, who had tailed him soundlessly.

“Oh, Jisung-ah,” he exclaimed, startled. “Want something?”

Jisung fumbled with the hem of his t-shirt, “Just water.”

Taeyong walked over to fill a fresh glass with water and handed it to a nervous Jisung with a polite smile. The boy gulped down the water, looking like he didn’t know how else to stall. He clearly didn’t want to go back. 

Taeyong chuckled, “You can stay.”

Jisung looked at him with big eyes, caught, but meekly nodded and took his place in the opposite corner of the kitchen. In an attempt to make him comfortable, he took out his phone and concentrated on it instead, ignoring his brain which reminded him of the tiny unchanged number lingering atop the messaging icon. God, that felt like his perpetual state nowadays.

Without paying much mind, he refilled his glass with more wine, although he wasn’t allowed to get drunk tonight.

When he looked up, something about Jisung’s unfocused, faraway gaze struck him. He knew that stare was like the way back home, but the usual tranquillity was missing with Jisung, and in its place was a palpable emptiness. In fact, he very evidently looked sad. 

“Not a party goer?” Taeyong asked.

Jisung stared at him blankly, until his attention finally seemed to zero in on Taeyong. Smiling shyly, he shook his head. 

Taeyong recalled Donghyuck and Renjun vehemently bitching about Jisung’s asshole of father a few days prior. He pictured the boy, his enormously large house, with only its hollowness paralleling its size, his parents’ typical business marriage, his chauffeur. 

He saw a paradigmatic case of being lonely despite not being alone, maybe to an extent Taeyong hadn’t experienced himself and maybe it was the fourth glass of wine kicking in, but he felt his heart break.

“It’s okay,” he reassured Jisung, grinning. “Neither am I. You can stay here with me.”

That seemed to cheer him up more. He nodded and smiled at Taeyong like a groom’s bride. 

Taeyong looked into his glass. The red wine looked dark brown, even black, in the dim kitchen light. He thought for a bit, letting his mind run free, and then he ignored every single warning.

“You know,” he started, gathering up his best language. “I’m a lot like you. College would've been so much worse for me if I hadn’t found some really nice people. I would’ve just stayed in my room and driven myself mad.”

Jisung bobbed his head, not quite understanding what Taeyong was rambling about. Really, Taeyong didn’t either, and if he had learnt anything lately it was to not say things mindlessly, but he continued anyway.

“I know it can be daunting, and tiring – to reach out. And it may look fruitless, because you fear that no one would comprehend the acuteness of what you feel, even if they generally get it. As you grow, it even becomes something you can’t be bothered with. Today’s world is moving more and more towards that.”

Taeyong bore in mind every time he ignored a text, stayed cooped up in his room, turned down an invitation to watch a movie, clamped down on flirtation at a party, rejected a kiss or a request to get coffee sometime, and rushed home quickly after dance practice because he didn’t want to say no to a pleading Ten again.

He was being awfully hypocritical, but he also remembered clearly how glad he was the handful of times he swallowed the urge to do any of that. Sometimes, some things just had to come from someone else’s mouth. 

Doyoung always said that to him. He said it was the reason he was fine with Taeyong being stupid. He was aware that Taeyong knew better, and it was just easy to dismiss one’s own judgement.

“But, once you try, you realise how worthwhile it is. And how needless it is to try and endure loneliness. How it drains you.”

Jisung’s mouth opened and Taeyong momentarily dreaded his entire soliloquy had been wasted on a miscalculated hunch. He could just blame it on the alcohol.

However, Jisung let out a thoughtful, “huh,” as if he hadn’t thought about it before, and nodded receptively. The gesture reeked of a schoolboy reflex.

Taeyong smiled warmly, “Ready to go back?”

The boy stood up straighter, inhaled and nodded. As Taeyong led him out, the door-bell rang. 

“Yong-ah!” his mother slurred loudly. “That must be the pizza, get that, won’t you? I already paid for it.”

He checked the time. It was nearing ten. Soon, they would have to pack the kids off. Apparently they were sleeping over at Donghyuck’s, except for Jisung, whose driver was dutifully parked outside, ordered to get him home at 11 0’clock sharp.

He gave Jisung one last squeeze to the shoulder and scurried off to open the door. When he opened up, his mind registered the three colossal pizzas first, and then Yuta’s apologetic face above them.

“Oh, hey,” Taeyong breathed. 

“I’m really, really sorry,” Yuta blurted, still outside. He was still in the clothes he was wearing through the day – a pair of ripped black jeans and a long-sleeved red t-shirt with a graphic print of some anime reference. 

“I got caught up in something but also I don’t want to give excuses –“

“Then don’t,” Taeyong cut him off, opening the door wider. He didn’t care at all, only curious, if Yuta wished to tell. But all that mattered to him was that he was here now. 

“Forget about it. First, come in or my mother will start yelling. Then get yourself a beer, a slice of pizza, make yourself at home and then you can tell me if you want. Sound good to you?”

He didn’t know where all the confidence came from frankly, but once Yuta broke into a grin, he decided it was worth it and let the man in. 

With incredible restraint, he waited patiently for Yuta to finish his greetings, and spend the customary period of time with the others that was enough to pass as good etiquette, before he turned to him and asked, stupidly, “Wanna see my room?”

Fortunately, Yuta seemed to have no qualms about missing out on the next big episode of Renjun’s Horror Nights at School (the boy was creepily obsessed with the supernatural), and everyone else was too absorbed to care. So they quietly slipped out.

Taeyong’s room was freezing, and he noticed he had left his window open.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” he muttered, walking over to shut it quickly. “There’s this cat that comes up to the house sometimes, so I keep it open.”

Yuta nods absently, taking in the room. Somehow he looked like a familiar presence in Taeyong’s room. It made him want to say, where were you all this time?

Taeyong was privately proud of how he had set his room up. He had his art pinned up on a big board, some unpretentious Studio Ghibli posters, and a line drawing painted on the window. He thought he had done his Art degree justice. 

His desk however suffered the ghastliness of some fat, uninspiring math textbooks that he didn’t have the heart to throw out yet (not because he hated math or anything like that – they were just ugly, and expensive). Other than that, he tried to keep everything neutral coloured, as it rendered him more space to change things when he wanted to.

But then abruptly stopped his activity and said, “I’m sorry, if I crossed the line today.”

It wasn’t as though Taeyong hadn't thought about it – both what he said and the act itself. It was undeniable that they had known each other for an exceedingly short time, but Taeyong couldn’t help but note how respectful what Yuta said had been. He made a clear observation, and gave him concise, no-nonsense advice.

“Nah, you didn’t,” Taeyong reassured him, sitting down on the bed. He patted the space next to him, and Yuta easily plonked down beside him. “By the way, what did you get caught up in?”

“Ah,” Yuta groaned. “I forgot to send in my visa renewal.”

Right. Those.

“I thought that takes more time.”

“No, no, it does. This is just the first step, and I almost missed a deadline.”

Taeyong pondered more, “So you’re not going back home?”

“No, I think I’m gonna stay back.”

Taeyong shuffles his feet, trying to contain his curiosity. “How come?”

“I don’t know. There’s nothing there for me.”

He had mentioned that he didn’t keep in touch with his high school friend because he kept shifting schools, and his closest friends from college – two girls – were living in Korea as well. His family by now was well off, and had no problem paying both undergrad and grad fees.

“Parents?”

He shrugged, “They’re there, I guess. But your parents’ home is sort of a place made for leaving, right?”

Taeyong chuckled, his own need to grow the fuck out of his parents’ house dawning on him.. “There’s nothing at all?”

“I mean, nothing I can’t remake here,” Yuta said, and Taeyong sensed that they could continue this conversation later, although they were past the stage where they hesitated to ask questions about each other’s lives.

He hummed and let his back hit the mattress, thinking of all the inconsequential, silly implications of Yuta’s decision – the ones that can’t be voiced yet. He didn’t know if he liked Yuta, but he knew that he liked how considerate he was, and he thought how he chewed on the inside of his cheeks when he was thinking it was hot.

He wondered if he could let himself like him. He really wanted to – he hadn’t liked someone in a long time. 

“What was the name of your last boyfriend, you said?”

Taeyong frowned, “Sehun. Why?”

“Nothing. He came by the other day, to play.”

“Oh.” He didn’t really have anything more to say. He didn’t think about Sehun much anymore, nor had for a while, long before they broke up. In fact he didn’t even remember telling Yuta.

“When did I tell you about him?”

Yuta smiled bashfully. “You didn’t, Johnny did.”

“Ah.” That made more sense. Johnny and Sehun were close. 

“What happened? With you guys.”

Taeyong laughed. He used to think Sehun was the bad boy he had always dreamed of, except he wasn’t a bad boy, and Taeyong had never actually dreamed of any such thing. 

“It wasn’t ever serious. We dated for, what, six months? Yeah. It was nice, I guess. He was nice to me, and he was there for me, in his own capacity. But when I broke my leg I distanced myself beyond salvation.”

Yuta brought up one leg and propped it up on the end of the bed, fingering his big toe, “He’s hot as fuck, though.”

Taeyong laughed and sat up, “He sure is.”

“But it doesn’t matter. You are too.”

There. One more observation that Taeyong what to make of. He turned his head sideways and smirked at the other man, who was now fully engrossed in the wonders of his left foot. So he _was_ trying to flirt with Taeyong all this while.

“Thanks, Yuta,” Taeyong said, pointedly, bumping his shoulder with his. 

There were very few instances when Taeyong had the upper hand in such a situation, both with Yuta and in general, but especially with Yuta. The other eyed Taeyong, mirroring his smirk, before looking away and breaking into a grin.

“Goodness gracious,” Taeyong teased. “You’re turning into a tomato.”

“Stop it, man.”

The two ultimately ended up giggling uncontrollably. Yuta laughed wonderfully when he was flustered, Taeyong noted, with a crinkle in his eye, shoulders scrunched and his many teeth gleaming.

“God, you’re such a terrible flirt,” Taeyong choked out. 

Yuta threw his hand in the hair and shrugged. He avoided his gaze but when Taeyong refused to take his eyes off of him, he looked back at him, piercingly as always. 

“I –“

Frantic footsteps followed by rapid knocking.

“Taeyong-hyung!” came Chenle’s booming screech from the other side. “Your mom’s crying!”

Yuta snorted, and the mood was instantly lost. Cursing his fate, Taeyong rushed to check on the latest developments. 

His mother forgot about the crying instantly when her vision landed on Taeyong, and instead she decided to propose a toast to her son, tapping her beer bottle with her nail.

“My lovely son,” she cried, pulling him into a stifling half hug. “I have loved every part of raising you, baby. Every part. You’re the most beautiful boy I’ve ever seen, in every way possible. Too beautiful to be so sad.”

He froze in her intoxicated grip, and the room’s decibels fell by a few digits. She then loosened her arm around him, and nuzzled her head into his shoulder instead.

“I wish I could do something for you, baby. I wish I could take away the pain. I never knew what I did wrong.”

A tight knot began to crystallise in Taeyong’s throat, and he violently crushed it. 

“I’m not in pain, ma,” he whispered to her. “I love you.”

“Really?” She asked in a small voice, perhaps audible only to him.

He pressed a kiss to her forehead. She had finally run out of gas for the night, and the time was anyway quarter to eleven. Gently he guided her head to the edge of the couch instead, and got up.

“I promised their mothers I would put them to sleep,” she whispered. Taeyong took that as his cue.

“Okay, everyone,” he called. “Time for bed.”

There was some whining but it was clear everyone was tired. The other two women had apparently already turned to bed. So he just had to make sure the five of them safely walked down two houses to Donghyuck’s and go to bed. 

He decided to first start with his mother, then escort the others back after saying bye to Jisung.

(“Are you really gonna force us to go to sleep?” Donghyuck asked, clearly stifling a yawn, and cozing up into Taeyong’s side. 

“Yep.”

“Lame. We wanna play Overwatch.”

“Too bad.”

He whined with the last shards of his energy, “Pleeeaaase, hyung.”

“I promised Jisung there would be no party without him.”

“That’s a lie. Jisung would’ve wanted this for us.”

“Nope.”

“You’re the worst.”

“Yep.”

“Did you and Yuta finally make out? I’m sick of your constant flirting.”

Taeyong exhaled, “It’s hyung to you, you brat. And we don’t flirt.”

“He isn’t even Korean. Now, did you make out?”

“Not your business. Oh, look, Renjun’s done, now go brush your teeth.”)

Yuta stayed by him the whole time, and when he went his way he didn’t say goodnight. This time, he bobbed his head and turned around, leaving Taeyong lingering, and as if to say: we aren’t done here.

-

“Ten!” Taeyong whined, but the boy didn’t look up from where he was SnapChatting the dance group a video of Taeyong refusing to get up from the sidewalk and yelling ‘Taeyongie is mad!’

There was universal misconception surrounding intoxication. Sure, there was the part where his limbs deserted his brain and snorts slipped from his nose like sand through a fist, but it wasn’t true that Taeyong did not know what he was saying. 

Taeyong knew exactly what he was saying, and he knew exactly how embarrassing he was being. Being drunk was about not caring, and for someone who drank as rarely as him, he was allowed this.

Ten and Sicheng – okay, mostly Ten – had landed up at his doorstep bang in the middle of his rewatching Porco Rosso at six in the evening on a Thursday after a whole day of doing nothing, and demanded that Taeyong immediately put some drinks down his throat.

Taeyong went easily, and when they arrived at the bar, turned out Ten had invited the whole gang. 

Leaning in, he whispered unnecessarily, “You’re getting drunk tonight, I don’t care.”

Taeyong thought of the fiasco last week, and about how he had to wake up tomorrow as usual for work. But then he took one look at how absolutely happy his friends looked and thought, fuck it.

He didn’t drink anything more than two vodkas because he was as light as a feather, and by his second shot – since he hated the taste he preferred shots, which got over quickly – he was blissfully babbling and snickering into Ten’s shoulder over the size of his pinky.

Thankfully, it was just a short walk to his house – Taeyong didn’t want to think how many more ways he would have found to screw himself if they took a bus or the metro, but it was far from the first time anyway – and Ten had taken it upon himself to babysit Taeyong today, so he walked him home.

“You know,” he said, pocketing his phone. “I can’t believe you managed to tell me nothing about how you’re actually doing tonight.”

The evening breeze had mostly sobered him up, and this quickened the process. He suddenly regretted demanding Ten’s attention in the first place,

Taeyong hummed, “What do you mean?”

He knew exactly what he meant, but in his defence, he did it unintentionally, and there were too many people in the bar to get sentimental anyway. Taeyong wanted to dance a bit and have fun, not deliberate all the things have gone wrong in the world. 

But he did nothing to catch up with Ten. He could’ve at least told him about Yuta, but it felt weird. Yuta seemed like such an outlier in his life. Moreover, he hadn't even told Doyoung about him. 

“I know you fought with Doyoung,” Ten stated petulantly.

“I wasn’t a fight, per say.”

“It was.”

“Who told you anyway?”

“Johnny Suh.”

“What?” Taeyong spat. He knew that Doyoung and Johnny were friends. They were in a few courses together and were also part of a book club. He didn’t know they were close. “Why the fuck does Johnny know that?”

Ten looked away, snatching the keys from Taeyong’s loose grip. “No one told me, idiot,” he mumbled as he opened the door, refusing to look at Taeyong. “I’m being sarcastic. I just figured it out.”

Taeyong eyed him suspiciously before stumbling inside.

“I can go up by myself, man,” he groaned, smiling, as Ten was about to enter.

“Oh, sure.”

“No, actually.”

Ten gave him a once over, “Okay.”

“Ten?”

“Hm?”

“Thank you.”

A soft, knowing smile crept into Ten’s lips. He looked as if he were waiting for it, that jerk, but Taeyong pulled him into a hug nevertheless.

“You’re gonna tell me everything soon. I know I’m nosy but you signed up for this when you became my friend, babe,” Ten grumbled into his shoulder like an order. After a moment, he added, "Unless you don’t want to. That’s fine too."

Taeyong chuckled, “No, I will. In a bit.”

On the inside, he hoped it would come soon. 

When he teetered up to his room, a warm surprise lay basking in the moonlight. On his floor was a pitch-black cat dozing off on the floor of his room. He had left the window open, as he does nowadays almost unwittingly. 

He was past being surprised anymore. In fact he subconsciously watched out for it whenever he came back from work, but it showed up only occasionally. Maybe once or twice a week,

When he heard his footsteps, it stirred slightly, but didn’t get up. He carefully squatted down and traced its fur with a finger, its body undulating under it.

“Will we be okay?” he mumbled to himself. The cat lifted its head gently to look at him – its eyes a burning green and pupils large – before it went back to sleep.

“I can’t lose him,” he went on. “Life without him would be...”

Life without Doyoung was like living as a vagabond. It was taking something eternal and perfect and putting it through a shredder. It was like talking to people constantly wishing you were having that conversation with him instead. It was like growing up without a childhood.

He was the reason that although he had been lonely in his life, he had never once been alone, in anything. 

“It would be shit.”

Exhaling deeply, he sat back and slowly lay down next to the tiny creature so they were both facing one another, and with a last glance at its quiet form, he fell into dreamless sleep.

When he woke up, he was running late by forty minutes. It was only much later that he realised that someone had taken his glasses off for him. 

-

A strange spell of tranquillity had fallen over him and Yuta. As the week went by Yuta proved himself to be more rowdy than Taeyong had anticipated, but a delight regardless. The kitchen was now a battleground between Donghyuck and Yuta, with Yerim as the mediator (if a mediator brought popcorn with her to enjoy the show). 

However, when Taeyong was alone with Yuta, it was something else. Taeyong was far from an expert on social clues, but at worst it was clear that Yuta eagerly wanted to be his friend, and Taeyong his, and at best... Well.

So, on the next Saturday afternoon (his mother decided to pack up early that day), Taeyong stood on Yuta’s front porch with two cups of overpriced hot chocolate. His apartment was on the fourth floor of an enormous pastel green building that looked like it was out of a picture book, each unit a veracious copy of the last. It must be a small, one-room house, but Taeyong was surprised that he could afford even that. Most students – especially foreign – couldn’t dream of anything more than dormitory housing.

As he shifted from on foot to another, his mind skipped from one emotion to another. The first thing he noticed was faint talking from the other side of the door, so Yuta wasn’t alone. But he had already come so far, and he was so excited about the drink. Maybe he could just pretend to have been in the neighbourhood and give him the cup and leave. 

He would look like an absolute moron, in that case.

Sighing, he supressed the giddiness and pressed the doorbell. The voices seized at once, and there was no movement. He waited, then heard a few muffled words, followed by soft footsteps and the door creaked open – ever so slightly – to reveal a strangely nervous Yuta.

When he saw Taeyong, a tinge of relief coloured his expression, but his voice still sounded terse as he said, “Oh, it’s you. Hey.”

“Hi!” Taeyong exclaimed in a vain attempt to lift the mood. 

Yuta glanced at the two take away cups in his hands and terribly faked a smile, and Taeyong felt his heart fall a bit. 

“Is it a bad time?” he asked. 

Yuta scratched the back of his head, nodding, but he also pulled the door open an inch wider so now he was half-way out, "Uh," 

“I’m sorry, I was just in the neighbourhood and I thought,” Taeyong trailed off. What was he planning as an excuse again? Because the neighbourhood thing was at best half a reason.

“It’s okay,” Yuta shook his head. “What did you get?”

“Oh! Hot chocolate.”

“Neat,” he forced a smile at Taeyong. “Did you need anything?”

Taeyong uhm’ed and ah’ed for a few seconds before deciding to give up the effort. Yuta was clearly getting impatient. “No, nothing. I’ll get going.”

“Already?” Yuta cocked an eyebrow, but Taeyong could see the knot in his shoulders relax a bit. So, yep. Already. 

However, just as he was about to respond, his vision somewhat glitched and he saw just over Yuta’s shoulder, a lanky figure lying down on the couch, unmoving. The lighting was dim, but he’d found those lengthy limbs strangely familiar and an uncanny feeling came over him. For a fleeting moment, his eyes met Yuta’s again, and they stared at each other.

Then Yuta swallowed, and Taeyong immediately knew something was wrong.

His foot reacted before Yuta could, shooting out to wedge itself between the door and frame, and with all this strength he pushed at the door till Yuta went stumbling back, and let himself in. 

Sleeping peacefully on the couch was Jisung, pale as rice and skin shimmering with sweat. He was dressed in his everyday clothes but his chest lay an elegant wreath of rosemary and some other herbs, and a small leather-bound book. Taeyong would have almost got the wrong impression if not for the faint snores coming from him. 

Taeyong whipped around to look at Yuta but was met with three faces instead of one, as he had expected. Right beside Yuta was Johnny Suh, from the college soccer team, and beside Johnny, with a face full of dread, stood…

“Doyoung?”

-

Yuta’s room was shabby and boyish in the best of ways. His sheets were a pale blue and unmade. His wall was littered with soccer posters, some homemade anime pictures of screen caps and doodles Taeyong assumed Yuta himself had made. It was the bedroom of a boy he used to wish he was. Not anymore, but once, when he was more confused and angry.

He never once imagined that he and Doyoung would be sitting here alone, spilling secrets. He didn’t even know they could have secrets like this.

It took a while to convince Taeyong that they had not kidnapped Jisung, who was still fast asleep in the next room, and were not about to sacrifice him to Satan. Taeyong now felt ridiculous that he even assumed that, but what was he supposed to think?

Once he stopped frantically yelling and trying to rescue the boy, which he was prevented from by a stone-like Johnny, the two of them retired to Yuta’s bedroom so Doyoung could explain everything properly.

“Do not move him, Taeyong!” Doyoung had cried, five minutes prior in the living room. “He _will_ die.”

Taeyong froze in bewilderment and gasped out, “What?”

Doyoung visibly swallowed, then resolution painted his expression. “Jisung is being haunted by a Shadow of Grief and if he fails to fight it, it will consume and kill him.”

A pause. Taeyong blinked at the others as they anxiously waited for him to respond. Johnny had loosened his grip around Taeyong, but he knew he could easily hold him back if he tried anything funny.

A few more painful seconds followed as Taeyong scanned the room slowly once more. Finally, he yelled, “ _Huh_?”

-

Kim Doyoung was born into a peculiar family. His parents were trained in sociology and business respectively but now ran an extremely remote and high-end antique shop, which took up the ground floor of his house. Taeyong and he were let into the shop as children only twice, once when Doyoung lost his house key and when he had to ask his mother for money to go buy the latest volume of a manga they were obsessed with.

His mother was moderately stern, and produced a child thrice as shrewd as her. His father was a sweet but distant man, and failed to establish the kind of closeness with his son that she had. They were a happy and comfortable family, despite their muteness and discipline that Taeyong found very intimidating.

But there was something they had never told Doyoung. At the age of eighteen, Doyoung became convinced that he was cursed, right about when his semester exams rolled around. He couldn’t concentrate, fell victim to countless small accidents, got a headache whenever he stepped out, and, although he stringently denied it then, was hearing voices. 

Except they were not voices. They resembled, not in sound but in spirit, a ruffling of leaves, or a rose being sniped by a pair of garden scissors. They both calmed him and distressed him, but he told himself it was just stress. His parents had always quietly pressured him into doing well in school, and his natural brightness accentuated his own anxiety to succeed. Maybe he was finally breaking.

He didn’t tell his parents anything concrete about his condition, and absolutely nothing about hearing voices, but one day a scalding, excruciating ache shot through his ear. He collapsed on the floor of his living room and his screams echoed through the entire street, all while clutching both his ears.

After the longest ten minutes of his life, he came to his senses, and realised he was wrapped in his mother’s arms, still on the floor. She and his father shared a weighted stare, and told him they had something to share.

Doyoung’s paternal great-grandmother was the village midwife, but no ordinary midwife. Her skill and precision transcended human capability, but sadly for her the age she was born into was ridden with war, famine, and worst of all – modernity. 

Doyoung’s great-grandmother was still safe from it, but when her daughter along with her best friend migrated to Seoul with their families, it couldn’t be stopped. Gradually, her best friend, who had the same abilities as her mother although she never could pick them up – it was not a learned skill -, had to resort to practicing her medicine under the guise of shamanry and had all her work called superstition.

But perhaps, in one lens, in the world of science, that’s what it was. Objectively. It worked better if the person trusted it, but that was the case with a lot of modern medicine too. 

Doyoung’s great grandmother had been a witch. Doyoung was a witch, and his grandmother’s best friend had too, but more interestingly, she happened to be Taeyong’s grandmother.

-

Ridiculously, Taeyong deliberated if this was all a big prank. It was certainly very elaborate, so if it were a prank, Doyoung would have planned it beforehand because he was terrible at bullshitting or faking anything. 

However, it felt a bit self-centred to think that Johnny, Yuta, Doyoung and Jisung of all people would get together to conspire against Taeyong while also magically knowing he would show up at Yuta’s apartment out of nowhere.

Maybe it wasn’t a prank. 

“This isn’t a prank?” he asked Doyoung meekly, just to play safe.

Doyoung gave him an unimpressed look.

“Okay,” Taeyong muttered under his breath and racked his brain for questions to ask. 

“Are you dating Johnny Suh?” 

Doyoung’s eyes widened and he let out a scoff, “Is that really what you want to know?”

“I don’t know what I want to know, but it’s not like this is hangman, right?”

His friend shook his head, “Just ask me the important questions please.”

Taeyong nodded. The thing was that his mind wasn’t exactly functioning at the moment. “What can you do?”

“Well, it’s more of a matter of what I do, not what I _can_ do. My abilities are limited to simply having magic in me that I can supply other elements with by conversing with them so they can perform certain functions.”

“Oh,” Taeyong said with pretension. “So can you, like, bring dead people back or something?”

Doyoung frowned. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

Now he was annoyed. “Doyoung, I don’t know where to start and I don’t know what to ask. You’re here telling me you’re a witch and I have thousands of years of folklore from all over the world to guess from and you expect me to ask you ‘relevant questions’?” 

“Okay,” he relented. “I can cure small ailments with a screwdriver, if I wanted to, but that’s not relevant anymore since we have modern medicine. Mostly I’m trying to focus on helping people overcome more… non-tangible issues.”

“Like depression?”

“I guess. Again, we have modern psychiatry for that. Sometimes there are less concrete issues that people face that don’t fit into mental illness criteria. Other times, they’re outright cursed. Their mattresses turn to concrete whenever they sleep, showers stop working when they want to bathe, no amount of food satisfies them.”

He paused, “Also, some people just believe in magic over modern science. I’ve had to refer people to therapy several times.”

“Wow,” Taeyong muttered. “You really get curses?”

“Two days ago a woman came to me saying that her ceiling was raining with garden lizards. When I went to her house, every inch of furniture and flooring was sealed with lizards.”

“Oh my god.”

“Yep. And Jisung now. It’s not really a curse, though, because it wasn’t inflicted on him by someone else. It’s a condition that arose from within.”

“So, the phone calls...”

“He is separating from his own body. I’m assuming the untethered part of him is trying to call him for help.”

Taeyogn shivered. “Will he be alright?”

Doyoung must have noticed how disturbed he was.

“We’ll figure something out, okay?”

Taeyong nodded, “Do you know any other witches?”

“Of course. Many. Mostly women in their middle age or older. Jeno’s one, but he’s even less experienced than me, for obvious reasons. But he’s been helping with Jisung. In fact he was here less than an hour ago. Also, Sicheng is a fairy.”

It sounded like an ironic statement, and Taeyong didn’t really know what to make of that (or anything else) so he nodded and went over everything again, like he was preparing for a school test.

“I’m sorry, by the way,” Doyoung added. “I’ve just never done this before.”

Ah, that. One thing that hadn’t stopped nagging at him. Why did two nobodies that Doyoung had known for at best one or two years in passing know this about him, and not Taeyong?

“Why, though?” Taeyong questioned. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

There must have been some reason, obviously. Taeyong wasn’t ready yet to suspect that their entire friendship was a farce. So, obviously, there had to be some big other reason that Doyoung has been lying to Taeyong for years that had nothing to do with the realness of their friendship.

Doyoung sighed softly. “It was your grandmother. She told me not to.”

“What? Why?”

“She had a very bad experience after she conceived your mother, Taeyong. It was the time of rationalism and science, and some students dragged her onto the streets and publicly shamed her for being a witch and a whore who stole money from people by deceiving them. After that she never practiced witchery again, and she never told your mother.”

A single tear left Taeyong’s right eye, but Doyoung was watching his feet, so he quickly wiped it.

“I understood it, you know. It’s not a safe practice, and the amount we’re surveilled today, sometimes I also get the feeling that something may just go wrong. Plus, it was literally her dying wish, so I could do nothing.”

“So you were never going to tell me?” 

It wasn’t a very mature or fair question to ask, he knew that.

Doyoung shrugged, “I don’t know. I planned to, but it’s not easy. At the beginning it took everything to keep it from you, to not let it slip in conversations, to keep everything related to magic out of my outside life. But it got easier with practice, but it never got easy to lie to you.”

With that he looked into Taeyong’s eyes. 

“How did you manage? To pursue your academics, and your law tuition. All those internships.”

Doyoung was surprised at the question. “Just as you balanced a double major and dance.”

Taeyong made a face, “Come on, they’re not even close.”

But he shook his head, “They’re more similar than you think.”

“Why are we in Yuta’s apartment?”

Doyoung exhaled heavily.

“Yuta! Come in.”

A few footsteps followed by a door cracking open. Yuta carefully peeked inside, his hair falling sideways. 

“You have to show him,” Doyoung proclaimed. 

Yuta froze, then looked like he was about to protest but eventually decided to relent. “Now?”

“The earlier, the better.”

Yuta sighed and left, door slightly ajar. 

“Okay, Taeyong,” Doyoung said urgently. “Do not freak out. Remember, anything is possible. Anything. Not dead people coming back to life, but, well, a lot of things beside that.”

“Okay,” said Taeyong, who had been watching the exchange cluelessly, with a perplexed frown, and turned back to face the doorway. Three jerseys and a pair of shorts were hung on the back of the door.

It was okay. Sicheng was a _fairy_ , whatever that meant. He could handle whatever Doyoung was freaking out about.

For at least half a minute, nothing happened, until Taeyong looked down, and sitting at Doyoung’s feet was a slender, beautiful Bombay cat with unusually emerald eyes. It was definitely the same one that came up to Taeyong's bedroom. 

He was about to ask the cat what it was doing here, but he remembered another human being was in the room, even if this other human knew Taeyong talked to animals fully well and was himself claiming that he spoke plant language.

“Does he have a pet or anything?”

Doyoung shut his eyes for a second, and picked up the cat, “Taeyong, this is Yuta.”

For the nth time in the last hour, Taeyong’s mind went into lockdown, and then he shot up from his spot and ran out. He opened every door without a care for privacy and ran to every window and the balcony, but they were both grilled. 

On the sofa near the front door sat Johnny, a magazine in his hands, unbothered. 

“Taeyong,” Doyoung came after him, the creature still in his hands.

Taeyong his hysterics, “Okay, then where are his clothes? If that’s him, where are his clothes?”

“Well, I don’t know the deta- “

“He transforms with them,” Johnny supplied from the back, only mildly interested in the exchange. 

The cat in his hands meowed loudly, as if in protest.

“ _Really_?” Doyoung spat at it. “Why couldn’t you just _tell_ me?’

“He wants you to picture him naked.”

“ _God_.”

Taeyong cleared his throat, “What’s he?” he said pointing at Johnny.

“He’s, just. He’s just Johnny from philosophy club.” 

“Oh. So, he’s normal?” 

“Yep. Totally not a freak.”

Taeyong paused. “I didn’t mean it that way.”

“I know,” he replied. “I’m sorry. You’re just in shock. Do you want some tea?”

Taeyong looked out the window. The sky was blindingly white with rain-less clouds, but he could see the day beginning to darken.

“No, thank you,” he shook his head. “I think I’ll head home.”

“Are you sure?” Doyoung asked worriedly.

“Yeah,” Taeyong muttered, walking to the front door, past the peaceful sleeping Jisung, and with a vague goodbye to Johnny. He opened the door and slowly shut it behind him.

-

When Taeyong came home, he hurried to his room, and broke down the second the door closed behind him, into ugly, uncontrollable sobs. The emptiness and grief of the past year, of the past few years even, came rushing back to him like an ocean wave to a shore, like he hadn’t been through this a thousand times before, like he hadn’t spent numerous, sleepless nights balling quietly to himself. 

He wondered how long it would take to stop pretending that he was okay with this. Pretending that he was okay that this was kept from him, by not one or two but multiple loved ones, pretend he was fine with the fact that he had failed his best friend, pretending that his entire world had come crashing down in a matter of a few hours, pretending that it hadn’t all confirmed his dirtiest, most indulgent fears.

It was perhaps safe to assume that Taeyong wasn’t delusional (not after he had just learnt that Doyoung could put some mushrooms and soil together and cure arthritis) and if he there was one thought that he had always had, in the attic of his brain, unassuming but undying, it is that life had always felt incomplete, like he to try harder than others to be content, like there was something missing (if only he knew what the universe had kept hidden from him were the fact that voodoo magic was real). 

He had really lived his life in an uninterrupted state of disjunction.

Taeyong had always perceived himself as inadequate, ancillary, and unremarkable – a sidekick at best, and a burden at worst. The only reason he hasn’t let that eat him up was because he couldn’t afford to be that self-pitying. But he needed to cry today. Tomorrow, or sometime soon, he will go back to Doyoung, ask him to tell him more about magic, but today he will cry.

He would cry for the lost knowledge, for his mundane birth, for the demise of the world as he had known it, a bit for that the fact that Doyoung hadn’t told him about Johnny, and for the fact that grandmother had spent her entire life in lies and fear, fragmented even to her own children. 

After an hour or so, after he had mostly calmed from the violent hiccupping, he heard faint rapping on the window. At first he saw nothing, but outlined in the thick darkness were two dazzling, emerald eyes, staring at him intently. Briefly he considered ignoring him, but Yuta sat there, with his back ramrod straight, unmoving and imposing. 

Groaning, he tore himself from his bed and strode up to open the window, plonking down on the desk chair beside it. He thought his crying had ceded, but seeing Yuta the cat perched on his window pane was enough to bring back some tears, and today was not the day for holding back, so he folded his knees in and cried some more, while being painfully aware that a human-cat was sitting a meter from him and staring at him the whole time. 

When he was positive that his tear ducts had been rendered useless (for now), he wiped his face with his wrists and glanced at the cat. He was facing away from Taeyong, his jet-black, matte fur putting the night to shame and he looked like he was enjoying the cool, summer breeze caressing them. Taeyong watched him stretch, his lithe body hollowing itself out, and then lift his front paw to give it a few delicate licks, before he gently reached out to finger his ear. 

Yuta didn’t pay him mind for a few initial moments, but then slowly inclined his head into Taeyong’s palm, and soon he was purring loudly to be scratched under the ear. Taeyong chuckled, digging his fingers softly into the dark, silky fur, “Aren’t you ashamed? Coming here after that disaster?”

But he couldn’t manage to be mad at a cat though, even if he knew it was a person. Yuta probably knew that too, and was taking advantage of Taeyong’s irrational sweet spot for small animals (or any animal, give him a grizzly bear and see), and also any person’s rational inability to hold animals responsible for human emotions. Anyway, even if it meant cheating his integrity or whatever, he welcomed any form of relaxation at this point. 

He got up languidly and hopped onto Taeyong’s desk, effortlessly avoiding the medley of objects on it, and ready to climb onto Taeyong’s lap. He stretched out his legs and pushed his feet against the desk, holding his hands open. Yuta placed a prudent paw on his leg, testing the waters, and then slipped into his lap without a sound. 

“Do you know,” Taeyong began, his voice husky and fractured. A thought came to him, as through a swimming pool, that this may not turn out to be his best idea, but he drowned it easily, and went on, “the reason Doyoung and I fought? I think it was because he couldn’t take it anymore. I have been moping around after my injury – you know about the injury, right? – for so long it feels like eternity. And I knew, you know. I knew I should have tried to move on, because life is harsh, but has been kind enough to put food on the table every day for me. 

“And I was willfully putting it off. I decided to give in to my weaknesses, my insecurities. Embrace the darkness or whatever, and I also knew I had people in my life who loved me like no one’s business, and the worst part of me wanted to see them give up, like I had. If not for anything else, just to be right.”

Yuta had stopped demanding scratches. Now he sat there, still and purring faintly, but welcome to the occasional finger circling his ear. 

Taeyong exhaled heavily, his voice was wet and throaty as he continued, “But you can’t love someone who has stopped giving back, you know? You might want to. You might think you would give them the sun, the moon, the Alps – everything. But in reality, you are just a body, with two eyes and two hands, and you don’t have the world to give.”

He withdrew the finger caressing the cat, and snaked his hand behind his forelegs to pick him up, earning a half-hearted meow in protest. He gazed into the rich, green eyes and pecked him on his tender nose. 

“But the thing that I had missed is the incredible things that these two eyes and hands are capable of, and foolish it is to try and destroy it like it’s a game. Out of something as inconsequential as spite.”

Taeyong had the slope of his nose nuzzling at his, but Yuta had had enough of being hoisted up like Simba by the time Taeyong’s speech ended, and he roughly wiggled out of Taeyong’s palms and dropped back into his lap, where he immediately started purring loudly again. Taeyong giggled at his antiques.

“I have so many questions about you,” he said. “Can you even understand me right now? I hope you can. Also, maybe, I hope you can’t.”

At that, although the clock had struck twelve, Yuta leaped out of Taeyong’s lap and onto the window pane again. Before Taeyong could even sit up straight, Yuta took one calculating look at the scene, and silently slipped into the night.

Once his absence hit Taeyong, he sensed tears welling up again, but decided to save the theatrics for a time with an audience. In fact, it was probably time to wrap up the show and go to bed. He had a lot to sleep over, and perhaps, if rationality and thinking (and crying) about it didn’t help, a night of good rest may just do the trick. Frankly speaking, Taeyong would like to have company, but he was glad that Yuta dropped by, and was generally satisfied with the amount of crying he had done. 

He carefully opened his door, and tiptoed to the kitchen to grab a bottle of water. Crying makes you very thirsty. In the dim light of the refrigerator, he sees a hurriedly scribbled message on a bright, yellow sticky note. _‘Staying at Auntie’s tonight! Sorry for not telling you!_ ’ Huh, so he didn’t have to worry about being overheard all this while after all.

Just as he was about to trudge back to his room, the doorbell rang. Dammit, they must have had a change of plans. Taeyong cursed his luck. He surely looked like a hot-mess right now. He frantically rubbed his eyes, hoping he could play it off as sleep, and went to open the door.

But what greeted was the sight of a lanky boy, clothed in faded sweatpants and oversized flannel thrown over a soccer jersey. His hair was smooth but disturbed, a cowlick sticking out, and his clothes were careless and crumpled, but in the warm, halogen light of his front porch, Yuta looked nothing short of a lucid dream, embodying in him all the absurdities of today’s late-capitalistic world. 

“I can understand,” he blurted out. Taeyong decided that being tongue-tied was a bizarre look on him. “When I’m, you know. I can understand.”

Maybe it was the fact Taeyong’s body craved warmth of a human body, or that he had spent the last hour crying to a cat, or that his parents weren’t home, or that Yuta looked so breathtakingly beautiful on Taeyong’s front porch, he lunged forward to close the gap between their lips and kissed him hard.

Yuta reacted with impressive speed, not wasting a second being taken aback. His hand left his shirt and he was gripping Taeyong’s shoulder in an instant. Taeyong wrapped his own arms around his thin, firm waist, and pulled him impossibly close. The soft breeze contrasted with the hot, harsh contact of skin in the best way possible, and Taeyong couldn’t stop from grinning into Yuta’s mouth.

They kissed like that, hands restless and wanting, until Taeyong felt his head throbbed and chest was filling up with exhilaration, and he laboriously broke away, not without a few helpless pecks to Yuta’s upper lip though. He tugged him impatiently into the house and banged the front door shut. A fist clenched in Yuta’s sleeve, Taeyong more or less dragged him through the house, to his room.

He briefly thought of how he had practically poured his heart out to Yuta the cat and was now unleashing an animal on Yuta the human. It wasn’t the healthiest idea, but he would like anyone to try and deal with this mess in a ‘healthy’ way, but soon Yuta led him to lie down and climbed on top of him and Taeyong couldn’t think of much else besides the hand creeping up his t-shirt.

There was nothing gentle or careful about this Yuta. In a matter of minutes, he had Taeyong backed up against the headboard and was burning bruises into the skin of his neck, clavicle, jaw, chest and anything else he reached in that particular position. His fingers tickled his sides, and Taeyong let out a squeal in between soft moans.

With a shaky hand to Yuta’s chest, Taeyong pushed at him until his mouth left his hot, red skin and he was sitting back in Taeyong’s lap. The irony of it was screaming at him and he took Yuta’s face into his palms to kiss him again before Taeyong’s head threatened to start spinning again. 

Somewhere along the way, Yuta began jolting and Taeyong realised he was clumsily peeling his shirt off. Smirking into his mouth, reached out to quell his movements and eased him out of the oversized flannel. Yuta then leaned back and with equally harsh movements tore his t-shirt off too. 

Taeyong had less than a second to take him in – all edges and straight lines, narrow but lean shoulders, ever so slightly tanned – before Yuta connected their mouths again. 

They didn’t talk much, given that even if for a minute their mouths or hands had nothing to do it drove them rabid. Taeyong was more than content just kissing him forever and inadvertently humping onto Yuta’s thigh, but Yuta had plans to escalate. 

He planted a hand on Taeyong’s sternum to prevent him from chasing Yuta’s lips as he propped himself on an outstretched arm. When he decided that Taeyong had simmered down for the most part, he traced his palm down Taeyong’s squirming chest, then abdomen, and hovered over the tent forming in his pants.

He shifted onto his knees and scooted back to settle between Taeyong’s legs. Apparently neither of them were in the mood for much teasing, and with a small nod from Taeyong, Yuta set to work and began to palmed him firmly through his pants.

When Taeyong had hardened considerably, Yuta slipped two fingers under Taeyong’s t-shirt to push it just past his hip-bone and reached into his pants to pull out his cock. Taeyong lifted himself a bit so the other could tug his sweats down. Before he started, he pressed a few breathy kisses to Taeyong’s hipbone.

Yuta sucked Taeyong’s cock exactly like he kissed him: hurried and vigorous. It wasn’t a very skilled blowjob, and his teeth scraped the underside of his dick a few times – eliciting loud hisses between soft moans – but today, miraculously, it felt like what he needed.

Taeyong thought he could use his tongue a little more, but every time he hollowed his cheeks, Taeyong had to bite his tongue and keep his hand from tearing Yuta’s hair out. By the time he neared his climax, his clothes were damp and smelly.

“Yuta,” he called weakly. “I’m close.”

He expected him to break away, but if Yuta wanted to take him in, who was Taeyong to complain? So he continued to whisper his name until he came in his mouth and Yuta swallowed him with a cringe.

“Hey! It was literally your idea.”

Yuta wiped his mouth and climbed up to drop himself beside Taeyong, smiling giddily, “I have the gag reflex of a nun, sorry.”

Taeyong laughed and reached to tuck himself back. He moved closer until Yuta got the message and connected their lips again. He obviously tasted different this time, but Taeyong ignored the fact that he was tasting his own ejaculate on Yuta’s lips. 

However, it was clear that the latter was growing tired, and his movement languid.

It was a shame. Taeyong craved to fuck Yuta like a madman, and only did it occur to him now that he had wanted it for a while, but their lips began had to burn and a handsome portion of Taeyong’s skin was plastered with wet, brown patches, they collapsed onto the bed, their chests heaving violently.

No one spoke for a while, and Taeyong momentarily thought they would slip into sleep like that, so he gathered the last of his strength and rasped out, “You’re fucking sexy.”

Yuta chuckled weakly, and hummed. Taeyong had no idea why he was trying to appease Yuta – he was the last person who required any sugar-coating. 

“I don’t want to have sloppy sex.”

“Great. I don’t want to be able to walk for a day after you fuck me.”

“Oh, my God,” Taeyong whimpered, earning a giggle. 

Yuta sat up to pull the sheets over the two of them, only to end up hugging them because it was way too hot. Once he was comfortably settled onto his side, he said, “I’m just kidding. But yeah, I’m fucking exhausted.”

Taeyong bobbed his head and reached out to push his hair out of his eyes, carefully since his tired fingers had trouble listening to any commands from his even more tired brain. Yuta had already closed his eyes, so Taeyong scooted to his side of the bed and before his body powered off on his mid-way, pulled off his own t-shirt over his head.

-

Taeyong wasn’t naturally an early riser, or so he presumed since he had no evidence to actually prove it. 

Forget twenty-one days, in the twenty-one plus years that he had been alive, he never once made a habit of waking up on his own. As long as he remembered he’d had to wake up early because of his family’s business. The days that he could slumber on till 9 am (yes – that was the line) were precious delicacies.

However, he responded well to alarms, and with meticulously accrued morning practices and mantras, he defeated his genetic makeup. 

When he tore his eyes open at 6 am, his eyes clot with sleep and his eyes reaching out to shut off the soft buzz of the alarm on autopilot, Yuta was already up, phone in hand. 

Once Taeyong’s sight adjusted to the mild, blue glow of the morning pouring through the window, he saw that opened on Yuta’s phone was a manga. 

Taeyong groaned and heaved his stiff body forward to rest his chin on Yuta’s shoulder and peer into his phone in vain. Not only were his eyes still practically glued, but he didn’t have his glasses either. Yuta didn’t startle, already having noted that Taeyong had woken up.

“Good morning,” he greeted, nudging his chin into his hair feebly and putting his phone down.

Taeyong rasped out something vaguely resembling the same. Rubbing his eyes some more, he reached out for his phone to check his own messages. He squinted as he unlocked it, and sitting third on the list of messages was a name that woke him up.

Like all the greatest apologies of modern times, Doyoung’s came in the form of a text. It was mildly hilarious, below tens of Taeyong’s unanswered pleas sat a message the size of a small senior dissertation. Taeyong sat up straight, and read aloud.

_‘Dear Taeyong,_

_I know that even though we spent hours talking yesterday it was hardly enough, and I know even after sending this text there will be lots to talk about. We can converse about magic and runes and all that later, but this apology is for us._

_I know it wasn’t hard to find out that I have been hiding a world of secrets, and a world that itself is a secret, from you for many, many years. I want to begin by saying that it wasn’t an easy task – and I’m just talking about the logistics. When your grandmother died, I was so lost and scared, despite having the full support of my parents. It pained beyond all logical thought to lie to you, and it still does, but I thought I had to respect her dying wish._

_As the years passed on, it became easier. I fell into more of a rhythm, and it became a habit to avoid my identity when I was with you. You have to understand that it was how I interacted with the entire world save for a few people. For people with this, it is just normal. It’s simply not allowed to tell anyone. Moreover, as we grew older, it occurred to me that telling you would be a huge deal. By their late teens, people already have a pretty fixed world view, and I kept putting it off._

_It was only in my second year that I gathered the balls to finally tell you, and before that process could take shape, your injury happened. This last year has been so hard for you, and I couldn’t bear to make it about me, but in the last month I realised that it would’ve been the perfect time to tell you, and I haven’t cared about customary practices for a while now, anyway. Or your grandmother._

_However, so much has happened this month (all of which I will tell you, whenever you’re ready), and after we fought I feared I had hurt you too much. I can’t even remember why I was so angry, but I don’t want to stand for it anymore. Whatever it was, I’ve forgotten about it. It was never for a second worth risking our friendship._

_I feel so stupid saying all this, Taeyong. Truth is that I despise the way I have lived. I hate myself, and it has never been more intense than it is now. I simply regret everything. My entire life I never meant to hurt you, but that’s quite a weak case at this point. I know you may be devastated, shocked, hurt and disappointed. And you may think I’m a fucking psychopath, but please bear this in mind:_

_You are my best friend in every capacity possible. I know I have hid so many things from you, but I have never once in my entire life hid my heart from you, but no one – not even my mom – knows me like you do. I promise you that, and I’m sorry for causing you so much pain, but if you will let me, I will try everything I can to ease it. I can’t do this anymore. I miss you so much. I don’t have a single right to do this, but I hope you forgive me._

_Yours,  
Doyoung_

Yuta released a breath he had been holding. “Wow.”

“Wow indeed,” Taeyong mimicked. 

“I don’t have anything that profound to say, by the way.”

Taeyong chuckled, “You better have some good answers, though. And I mean now, I have immediate questions.”

“Yes, sir,” Yuta turned to face Taeyong and propped an elbow on the bed, an unconcerned smile plastered on his lips. 

“Tell me,” Taeyong began, however saddened he would be to wipe that smile from his face. “Wasn’t it a bit much? To have me open up about my deepest secrets while you were in your cat avatar?”

Also have him baby talk him in the most revolting of ways. Taeyong remained utterly blameless for that. Only psychopaths talked to animals in a normal voice. God, he wanted to bleach his memory. 

Yuta bit the inside of his cheeks, “Well, the initial idea was to spy on you.”

“You’re not really making a case for yourself here.”

Yuta outrageously shrugged. 

“You never revealed that much about yourself, anyway. Is it so bad to want a cute boy to call you his sugar-plum baby-cakes sometimes?” he taunted jokingly, raising an eyebrow.

Taeyong gave him a lopsided smile, but he wasn’t going to let him off the hook that quickly, even at the ass-crack of dawn. “Thanks, but I’d like an answer.”

“I don’t know, Taeyong” he sighed. “You’re not the first person. What can I do? I’m just born that way. It’s not like someone’s written a manual for cat-human ethics.”

“But don’t you think it was a bit wrong? Logically, speaking.”

Yuta scoffed haughtily, “Logically? I am a guy who can magically transform into a cat one-sixth my size with black fur and night vision. None of this shit is logical.”

Well, he had a point. He was about to ask him if people in the magic world didn’t care about ethics, but it felt too harsh. Taeyong wasn’t going to sit here and lecture Yuta about morality. People did worse things. 

Also maybe he simply wasn’t willing to give Yuta up. Maybe if he is angry later he’ll give him an earful.

“Okay, fine,” he said. 

A lull settled into their conversation. It was obviously not the right time to have such a conversation. His brain was hardly functioning. 

“What about Doyoung?” Yuta inquired in a small voice.

Taeyong put his phone aside and threw his hands over his face. For the millionth time, but the first time this morning, he went over his best friend’s life as vividly as his groggy mind allowed him to.

Doyoung had magical powers and the ability to talk to plants, which he found out belatedly at seventeen, and suddenly had to reconstruct his entire world view and at the same time struggle to cultivate his skills with little help while performing all the other activities of an ordinary student. 

Moreover, he had to hide. From friends,, girlfriends, boyfriends, relatives, because there were strict rules, and because of Taeyong’s grandmother’s wishes he couldn’t even tell his best friend, and now a young boy’s life was on the line, and he was absolutely lost.

Resting on Taeyong’s desk was a small, richly coloured croton which Doyoung had gifted to him on his own birthday this year. He said to Taeyong, ‘watching and nurturing a plant will remind you that there is so much life in this world’. Taeyong thought he was full of shit and that it was another jab at Taeyong’s latent depression back then. 

Doyoung had a lot more apologising to do. As the shock faded from Taeyong’s nerves, fury quietly replaced it, but he would bargain with it later. Right now, all he could think that everything that had happened to Doyoung was, to put it bluntly, pretty fucked up, and it shattered his heart to imagine how distraught Doyoung must be. 

“I’m gonna ask him a million questions and then forgive him. What else?” Taeyong said.

He had all the time in their long, upcoming life to appropriately grill Doyoung, but right now, the least he could do is be there for his best friend, like he had never failed to be for Taeyong. So he reached for his phone, and slowly typed out a reply.

**From: You  
To: Doyoungieee**

_Get your ass to the restaurant today_

_At least thrice a week._

_Mom misses you_

_And stop overacting. I love u 2_

-

Doyoung had spent half his childhood in Neo Noodle, since his own mother never let them into her work space. He knew it like the back of his hand. At 2:58 pm, just as the last set of customers were finishing up their lunch break, he showed up. Even Taeyong had to marvel at his timing.

As he saw him tread up the front, hesitant but determined, he snickered, provoking an annoyed frown but maybe also the apparition of a helpless smile.

“Ma!” he called loudly, gathering up the dishes on the table and the bill and thoroughly enjoying the panic on Doyoung’s face. He loved her like a second mother, but there’s only so much smothering one could take, and he had just earned half an ocean of it over the month of absence. 

As she emerged from the pantry, Taeyong muttered, “See you on the other side,” and took his leave without giving Doyoung a chance to respond. The last thing he heard as he shut the kitchen door behind him a shrill “Doyoungie!”

Yuta eyed him curiously, which Taeyong responded to with a raised eye.

He lit a cigarette in the meantime as he waited for mother to stop nagging Doyoung (oh, the irony of it all – Taeyong enjoyed taking such small forms of revenge). In a few minutes, Doyoung burst out the door, ready to pick a bone. Taeyong put out his cigarette.

“Hey.”

Doyoung, who had previously looked like he was about to hurl a string of mild abuses at Taeyong, sobered up. He shuffled next to Taeyong and cleared his throat.

“How’ve you been faring?”

“Quite okay. As okay as I could be, I think, doubting if we’ll ever be okay. But okay, nevertheless. I found a new friend. I socialised with Hyuck’s gang. Did lots of laundry with Mom, and even worked on my art.”

Doyoung nodded, trying to look engaged in the small talk he had initiated himself. “That’s good,” he said in a tight voice.

Taeyong faced away from him, watching the light traffic through the narrow frame of the back alley. “You?”

The question hung in the air. It was meant to be rhetorical, of course, although Taeyong wanted desperately to know how he was. 

However, the moment of silence from the younger was jarring, and when Taeyong looked back at him, he saw that two neat streams of tears had traversed down his cheeks, and thick pools in his eyes were waiting to spill many more. All Taeyong had to do was touch his arm, and he broke loose like old autumn leaves. Soon he was rubbing snot into Taeyong’s shoulder with his head dipped awkwardly.

There was no hesitation when Taeyong held him, only age-old resolution – the way a hero can’t help but be good even when he’s wronged and dishonoured. Turning Doyoung away would stuffing a pebble in his shoe deliberately. It would feel off, before anything.

It occurred to him that he had been holding a lot of crying people lately. His mother, first, and then Yerim when she failed one of her entrances a few days ago. But it had been a while since he had seen Doyoung wail. He remembered Doyoung’s blaring cries when in elementary school Taeyong promptly handed him a baby frog as a gift. Turned out, Doyoung had a near phobia of frogs.

He smiled quietly at the memory. What a weird kid he was. Who gave their friend a frog as a birthday gift? He couldn’t even understand why Doyoung started crying.

Doyoung began to hiccup at some point, at which a concerned Donghyuck thrust his head out of the pantry window, eyes speedily surveying the scene before he caught Taeyong glaring at him and retreated.

“Okay,” Doyoung declared shakily, apparently having had enough of his own crying, but his attempts to contain it only worsened the hiccupping. 

“I missed you,” Taeyong said.

“Me too,” his friend choked, violently blowing his nose and wiping it. He paused shortly, trying to remember what he was going to say, and whimpered, “I forgot what I was going to say,” before breaking into sobs again.

Taeyong wrapped his arms around his wide shoulders as his laughter reverberated through both their bodies. “Stop being a baby,” he teased.

Once Doyoung had actually exhausted his tear ducts, he squared his shoulders and pulled in a deep breath.

“It was- _hic_ ,” he began, “such hell these past few weeks. I hate this. I’ve always hated this. I never wanted to lie to you. When I blew up at you, I – _hic_ – was so angry with myself. Who was I to find fault with you when – _hic_ – when I –“

“Doyoung, no,” Taeyong interrupted. “This isn’t tit for tat. If something I did bothered you, you had every right to say it, okay?”

Truth be told, Taeyong was surprised. At some level, he was still expecting Doyoung to reveal that he didn’t depend on Taeyong as much as the other depended on him. He believed that he had another life, another world, to fall back on. 

The younger nodded. He seemed to have calmed down a little, “Yesterday, when you asked me how I manage it, I wanted to laugh - _hic_ \- If only you knew what a mess I’ve been. 

“Your idea of a mess is skewed.”

“No, I’m just good at hiding it,” he shook his head. “God, I hate that hag. I hate your grandmother. Fucking bitch! And I couldn’t even keep my promise at the end.”

Taeyong laughed, “No, you’re right. She wanted me to live my whole life in the dark. Honestly, for this, I agree. Fuck her.”

Old people usually expect others to put up with the pain they did in their lives. Pulling down his sleeve, he wiped the last of Doyoung’s tears with his palms. He looked so tired, and not from the crying. The skin below his eyes was turned a light violet, and his face had broken out in places.

“So this is why you never let me into your mom’s work space. Because it was yours?”

Doyoung smiled, “I could only study my magic there. All I could put in my room were a bunch of plants. I didn’t want to cut people off from my room too.”

Taeyong nodded, “So, Johnny Suh, huh?”

“That was very recent, I swear. It happened like three weeks ago.”

“Hey, hey. It’s okay. How come?”

Doyoung blushed, “I used to fancy him a bit even in philosophy club. He somehow knew, about Yuta, about Sicheng. And I don’t know. I’d never told an outsider about it. We went out for drinks one night after bumping into each other, and I just told him.”

“How far has it come?”

“We certainly like each other a lot, and I just trust him. He’s mature, reliant, but silly all at the same time. I’m just waiting for the right time. Also,”

Taeyong coked an eyebrow

“He can pick me up like a _ragdoll_.”

“Ew.”

Doyoung laughed beautifully, “And you like Yuta? Of all people?”

“Is that bad?”

“He’s a pain in the ass. Everytime he opens his mouth I have a migraine.”

Taeyong could imagine why. People liked to pull Doyoung's leg, and Yuta seemed like the type to like an easy rile up. 

“Well, since he uses it to flirt with me, it’s not that bad.”

“Ugh. It was the catboy feature, wasn't it?”

“Please don’t say it out loud yet.”

-

“I don’t think I’m going to keep my permission for you to keep coming up to my room,” Taeyong declared as he opened the door to his room.

He had just closed the shop, but Yuta and the others generally leave early. Yuta was lying down on his bed, light on and everything and with his phone in his hands. And he was wearing sleeping shorts. Taeyong’s sleeping shorts.

“Sorry,” Yuta mumbled, very clearly not sorry, and clumsily sat up to pull Taeyong onto the bed.

“Wait, wait,” Taeyong protested, which Yuta happily ignored, so he had no choice but to throw his bag aside. 

When they fell sideways, Yuta kissed him fully on the mouth a few times before settling into the sheets more comfortably.

So he had invited himself to a sleepover, Taeyong mused.

“I usually bathe before I sleep.”

“Okay, go bathe. I don’t mind.”

“I- why would- I meant,” Taeyong sighed. “Have you cleaned up?”

“I licked myself a bit.”

“I’m gonna say that it doesn’t count.”

Yuta whined loudly and wiggled childishly. ”You can’t force me to bathe.”

“I can literally kick you out of my house,” Taeyong laughed, standing up and heaving an un-cooperating Yuta onto his feet.

“I don’t have any clothes.”

“Oh, but that won’t be a problem, seeing that you’ve already let yourself into my closet.”

Yuta sneered, “I invaded your closet the day I met you.”

“That’s literally not even a good joke. I came out when I was like, fifteen.”

Taeyong rummaged through his drawers and fished out an extra towel to throw at Yuta, and plonked down on the bed. He dragged himself into the bathroom as Taeyong scrolled through his phone, but poked his head out a minute later.

“You’re not coming?” he asked, eyebrows knitted and very sincere.

Taeyong gaped at him. “Uh- I thought. Um. Okay, hold on.”

He jumped off of the bed and carefully stepped into the bathroom. Frankly, he didn’t know what he was expecting. A part of him thought this was one of those times Yuta played dumb but had something up his sleeves, but as he undressed, the other man didn’t spare him a single glance.

He diligently tried to figure out how the shower worked and began washing himself. 

Taeyong watched him for a few seconds, eyes skimming the taut muscles that covered his slim figure. His arms were still thin compared to the meat on his legs, he noticed. 

When he stepped in behind Yuta, the man changed the setting to hand shower and began washing Taeyong. They washed each other’s hair and scrubbed each other’s backs. Yuta did everything with a bewildering expertise that really had Taeyong wondering how many people he had bathed.

He asked him as much when were sat on Taeyong’s bed, changed into fresh clothes, when Yuta was drying his hair.

Yuta halted his activity, “Uh, I guess.”

“Oh.”

“I’m from Osaka, stupid. We go to the sauna a lot.”

Taeyong smiled, embarrassed. “Right.”

When they turned the light off and crept up into bed, Taeyong asked, “How come?”

“Hm?”

“How come you’re here?”

Yuta groaned, “I just didn’t want to sleep alone.”

Taeyong remembered Jisung, whose parents had left on a business trip and who was currently still lying on the bed in Doyoung’s guest room. Whose loneliness was so consuming that it was literally killing him. Then he thought of Yuta, away from home but claiming it held nothing for him, and living alone.

He leaned forward and kissed him on the nose, “Okay.”

Yuta scrunched his nose, and hummed.

-

On a busy Friday afternoon, Taeyong received a call from an unknown number. Seeing as he had just taken the last order and there was no one new coming up the front, he decided to take the call.

“Hello?”

“Taeyong-hyung!” came a high-pitched scream. “Is this you?”

Taeyong frowned, “ _Chenle_?”

“Hey!”

“How did you get my number?”

“Well, first I called Hyuck but he said he never saves your number –“

Wonderful.

“So I called his mom but she didn’t pick up. Then I looked up your restaurant and called all the numbers from there till I got yours. Luckily it was just the fifth try. I called two Chinese numbers too. It was pretty cool, but my mom is going to kill me about the money I wasted on international calls.”

Taeyong could think of a million better ways to get his number. In fact, Donghyuck was literally five metres from him, platting some dishes while listening to music, but he decided he would rather not know what goes on in Chenle’s mind.

“Wow, okay. Um, what can I do for you?”

“Oh, Jisung’s at my place and he’s being weird.”

Taeyong shot up from his station, “I’ll be there in a while. Text me your address.”

“Okay!”

In fact he couldn't 'be there in a while' since he was still working, so he hung up immediately and called Doyoung. 

“Hey, what’s up?” 

“Jisung is at Chenle’s house.”

“What!”

“Yes. I’ll forward his address to you.”

“I’ll get there. Who told you?”

“Chenle, who else?”

“Huh, why did he call you of all people?”

That made Taeyong stop and think. He had no idea why Chenle went through the trouble of getting his phone number from some godforsaken source and calling him before Jisung’s parents or any of their friend’s parents or Mark or literally anyone.

Oh, God. Was he supposed to be the adult now? Thank God he was busy. 

“I don’t know. He’s weird.”

“He really is. Anyway, see you.”

“Yep.”

-

“So, he doesn’t remember anything?”

Despite being aware that he was talking about Jisung in third person while he was there, he thought it was more appropriate to address Doyoung in this situation, since Jisung was completely oblivious and blissfully slurping away his teokbokki ramen.

“He says he remembers a dream, vaguely, about walking endlessly through darkness –“

“And teokbokki!” Jisung supplied.

Doyoung sighed. “And tteokbokki. After that that he claims that he suddenly remembered Chenle, and then he woke up.”

Taeyong eyed the table. Chenle and Jisung were hardly interested and had already started rambling about some gaming channel. Jeno was visibly still shaken as he listened in on Taeyong and Doyoung’s conversation. Doyoung just looked heartbreakingly exhausted. 

It made Taeyong want to personally tuck him into bed.

“I explained everything to him, without Chenle, of course, but,” the three of them looked at Jisung who was wrestling through a fist full of food in his mouth. 

To think Doyoung and Yuta were splitting their hairs over him for two weeks.

His friend exhaled, “Yeah. He’s not very disturbed, or maybe it’ll hit him later. In some ways, I’m glad, I guess.”

Taeyong got up to take orders from some customers.

“What did he say?” Yuta asked eagerly, looking up from where he was frying some vegetables.

“He doesn’t remember much. Just a dream,” he really didn’t want Yuta to burn the vegetables, or himself. “I’ll tell you everything later.”

“Oh come on," Donghyuck cried. “What the _hell_ is going on?” 

He and Yerim were fuming in the corner as they plated some bowls. Taeyong didn’t allow them to join the table, but mostly because it was literally dinner time and every table was occupied. However, he knew Jeno wanted to tell them, and he should do it on his own terms. Thankfully his mother wasn’t here.

He went back to Doyoung after serving the order.

“You look tired.”

“This past month has been a lot,” Doyoung said, in almost a whisper. “Five people came to me with curses in a single week, and then the whole lizard thing. Now, this…”

“Go home,” replied Taeyong. “You can tell me later.”

“Really?”

“Of course.”

Taeyong wanted to give him some space, so he walked back to his station, where he was bombarded by Donghyuck’s constant glowering and an occasional “Hyung, tell me!”

He wondered if Jisung was safe now. Did he develop a natural immunity against loneliness now? Or at least the soul-splitting aspect of it. Probably the latter. It would be cool though, if Jisung was now immune to ever feeling sad and empty.

As the group left, the boy bounded up to Taeyong. 

“Hyung,” he said, formally. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” it sounded like a question. Taeyong didn’t exactly know what he was being thanked for, since he didn’t even show up at Chenle’s.

“You told me to reach out, right? I did.”

Hold up. Does that mean he remembered? But it was too late. Before Taeyong could open his mouth, Jisung took off bolting in the other direction to join his friend.

-

Since his mother wasn’t feeling well, Yuta helped him close up that day. As they washed the dishes together, a wave of deja vu hit Taeyong.

“What did you mean when you said you were spying on me?” Taeyong asked, placing the plates in the steamer.

Yuta let out a laugh. “Nothing, man. Doyoung just mentioned you once so I got curious. I knew the guys always ate here but I’d never joined them.”

He grunted as he scrubbed the saucepan.

“So I just came to see it once. Then I found out you’re some freak for cats.”

He paused to wink up at Taeyong, “And super cute.”

Taeyong ducked to hide the redness rushing to his cheeks. Yuta flirted pretty shamelessly with him (and others), but it flustered Taeyong every single time. Heaven knew exactly how whipped he was for him, but he didn’t mind. 

He dipped his hands in the cleaning water and flicked them at Yuta, who simply grinned, “I’m already gross, so joke’s on you.”

Taeyong rolled his eyes at him, “How many people know about you, anyway?”

“Like, five?”

Taeyong dropped his cloth and stared at him, mouth agape. “What?”

“Hm?”

“Me, Johnny, Doyoung and Jeno. That already makes four.”

Yuta nodded nonchalantly.

“Your own parents?”

He shrugged, “Nope.”

“Who was the first person you told?”

“Doyoung.”

Taeyong let himself process that. For the rest of the time, he remained silent. Yuta hadn’t told a single soul about himself in the twenty two years that he had lived, and Taeyong was butt hurt that Doyoung, who had known about magic for merely three years, hadn’t told him because he was bound by a dying woman’s last wish.

It didn’t make much sense. He was still troubled by the fact that they kept so many things from him, but his view of what was normal and 'proper' were rather contorted after the past week. If people were hiding something, maybe it was worth hiding. Even if it wasn’t morally right. 

It was okay. Well, not fully, but he knew in the end he would find it in himself to forgive, and perhaps even forget.

It was only when they had locked the store and were putting away garbage that Taeyong had to marvel at the how much things had chnaged. 

“Why didn’t you tell anyone?”

“I just didn’t feel like it. No one seemed worth it.”

Taeyong smiled at the implication, not just at the fact that Yuta trusted Taeyong so much, but also Doyoung. He was so proud of his best friend. Halting, he grabbed a fistful of Yuta’s shirt, and tugged him forward.

“And I’m worth it?”

Yuta smirked, but it lacked its cunning this time, “Well, we’ll see.”

“And you don’t think I’m mundane?”

“Okay, now you’re just fishing for compliments.”

Taeyong smacked his arm, at which Yuta giggled, and said, “I think no amount of magic can top you.”

Taeyong grinned into the kiss like a Cheshire cat.

-

“So, he’s just gonna lie there the whole time?” Doyoung asked, pointing at the Bombay cat sprawled in the sun, limbs twisting in impossible ways, and not sparing them a glance.

Taeyong smiled and walked over to pick him up, ignoring the protests. He nuzzled his nose into Yuta’s and babbled a string of sweet food names in a baby voice, which he welcomed with a handsome amount of purring.

“I feel uncomfortable,” Doyoung declared with disgust. “Tell him to go.”

“He’s not even bothering us. It’s not like we’re discussing government secrets.”

“Frankly, if we were, he would definitely be invited, but this is weird.”

“I’m newer to this than you are.”

“He would leave if you told him to.”

Taeyong shrugged, turning back his laptop screen. “He’s like the cat I never had,” he sang.

Doyoung groaned loudly and dropped his notebook onto his face. Beside him was a small array of spices and soils that he had brought in neatly packed jars to his house. On Taeyong’s desk, his croton was somehow beaming, happier than he had ever seen it. He could imagine why.

He never fathomed that it would be this easy to forgive when you loved someone. It should scare him, but for now, he’ll take it.

**Author's Note:**

> i finally realised why i make so many typos: i use microsoft word. so i started using google docs instead so hopefully i havent made any stupid typos and stuff. 
> 
> anyway, please please tell me how you liked it and if you had any thoughts while reading pls! i don't have a twt and i'd rather die than admit i write fanfic to my tumblr moots so i would really appreciate comments here!
> 
> [tumblr](https://uhchiha.tumblr.com/)


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